A&T Center Focuses on AI and National Defense for Security Month

North Carolina A&T's CREO is hosting a speaker series and hacking competition this October focusing on AI security, health privacy, and national defense.

In 30 seconds North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University's Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research, Education and Outreach (CREO) is running a free speaker series and hacking competition through October 29, 2026. The program covers AI agents, voice data privacy, drug discovery model security, and national defense careers.

What happened

During Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research, Education and Outreach is hosting events on autonomous AI agents, voice biomarkers in health care, and generative AI models used in drug discovery. Interim director Ahmad Patooghy says cybersecurity now reaches well beyond IT infrastructure into everyday applications and specialized sciences.

The lineup mixes faculty, alumni, industry professionals and Department of the Navy experts. Tia Pope examines the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident on Oct. 6, with a hands-on exercise designing safeguards for an agent that has tool access. Farzan Ghane covers protein folding, AlphaFold and generative AI in drug discovery on Oct. 16, and Olaide Nathaniel Oyelade follows with the security questions around AI-driven molecular generation.

Practical sessions are part of the mix. An alumni panel and Capture the Flag challenge on Oct. 14 requires no experience, and a ThreatOps Challenge on Oct. 22 uses a live SentinelOne console. Mohammad Arif discusses privacy risks of voice data in health care, and Bedeabasi John explains how attackers hide commands inside web pages and PDFs. The series closes on Oct. 29 with a talk on careers in national defense.

Cybersecurity is no longer a niche field. It touches health care, science, defense, and every app on our phones.

Ahmad Patooghy, interim CREO director

Why it matters

As artificial intelligence permeates biological research and clinical diagnostics, securing those pipelines becomes vital. Tools that assist in protein folding or molecular generation can become targets for attackers seeking to manipulate structural data or extract sensitive information, and voice recordings can reveal health details their speakers never meant to share.

The prompt-injection topic is the most immediately practical: if an agent reads untrusted content and can act on it, sandboxing and human approval are the controls that keep it from becoming an accomplice. All sessions are free and open to every discipline, and most can be attended online. We suggest checking the A&T IT Service Desk or A&T Online if you plan to join remotely.

What we don’t know yet

One session, led by Kenneth Sherin of AgDefenders / NC PaCE on Oct. 19, has no announced topic. The announcement also says nothing about recordings, so readers who cannot attend live may not get a second chance. The university profiles portal lists faculty research for anyone wanting more background on the speakers.

Opinion · Open question

The expansion of cybersecurity events into drug discovery and voice biomarkers shows how porous technical boundaries have become. When systems handling protein folding or clinical data face adversarial pressure, the threat model changes entirely.

I wonder how many non-technical researchers attending these sessions will carry these defense principles into their daily workflows once October ends, and whether anyone measures that.

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Original source: North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University

Produced with AI support and reviewed by the newsroom

Falcon · Signals analyst · Riyadh

“Cross-disciplinary cybersecurity awareness is finally moving beyond basic server room hygiene.”