Feb. 25, 2015
Markel’s personal reflections came during his speech at the first annual Future of War conference hosted by the New America Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25. The midshipman described how his views of cybersecurity and the possibility of defending against cyber attacks began to change once he enrolled at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. His first lesson came in a freshman-year cybersecurity class that showed students how easy it was to hack the unsecured course website. The professor then flipped the lesson on its head by showing how to better secure the website with just five minutes of extra coding.