You wouldn’t know that Polyxeni (Xenia) Mountrouidou – known to her students as Dr. X – was a hacking expert just by looking at her. Yet lurking beneath the spectacles, golden locks and stench of academia lies a hacker extraordinaire. In fact she’s so good at it that she was awarded a $295,998 National Science Foundation grant to carry on hacking to engage students in cybersecurity training.

Mountrouidou uses hacking to demonstrate the inticacies of cybersecurity. Not bad for somebody who just started her first semester at Wofford College in the fall. Now the three-year project will allow Mountrouidou to develop course modules and labs to be integrated into the core curriculum of the college where she teaches primarily computer science students. Of course, this could extend as the NSF grant will allow her to develop her scope so as to encompass other programs dealing with cybersecurity issues, e.g. political science, governance.

Dr. X has come a long way since her early days in Athens where she started a club of hackers dubbed the “Revenge of the Terriers.” Of course, these are not the type of black-hat hackers that will steal your credit card details. Rather, they meet weekly for the heck of it, while looking at ways to ward off cyberattacks.

In cybersecurity there are black-hat hackers that are malevolent, and white-hat hackers that use hacking to better the world. Dr. X is among the second group, and while bettering the world she is also getting ahead in her sphere.
Her goal is to create an army of white-hat hackers who will be able to handle cybersecurity issues as employees of the future and learn to defend these from attacks.