PIE Internship Offers Rockwood Student Real-World Experience in Corporate Cybersecurity

Every Wednesday morning this summer, rising Marquette High senior Landon Buscher gives a presentation about threat intelligence to the information technology (IT) security team at the McCarthy Holdings, Inc. (McCarthy) Des Peres office. Headquartered in St. Louis, McCarthy is the oldest privately held national construction company in the country and is the comprised of McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. and Castle Contracting, LLC.

At the same time, Buscher, a Rockwood Partners in Education (PIE) cybersecurity summer intern, is writing a program to automate the process so that a computer can present similar threat intelligence assessments in the future.

“We’re automatically collecting information from different cybersecurity news sources and cross-referencing that against a list of our third-party vendors to detect if any have been involved in any sort of breach or cyber incident,” Buscher said. “Another intern and I are primarily using Python for the back end of the program – which will automatically scrape these websites for information – then that will be compiled using Javascript into our web portal.”

To put it more simply, Buscher is spending his summer creating a cybersecurity tool that will be put to work in an actual corporate setting.

“That project has been great. It was something me and one of the other managers approached the interns about as an extra opportunity, something cool to play around with, and they really ran with it,” said Leyla McCrary, director of IT infrastructure for corporate IT at McCarthy. “That can be huge for us because it can alleviate some of the more manual burden on our other security engineers to have to try and find this information on their own.”

The PIE Summer Internship program places students in a career area of their interest leading into their senior year of high school. The internship provides students with career exploration opportunities while allowing them to gain practical, real-world experience in a field of interest by partnering with business professionals.

Buscher said he has always been interested in computers and started learning web development from his brother at an early age. From there, his fascination branched off into other aspects of computer science, such as software development and cybersecurity.

His time at McCarthy has further solidified his interest in the field. He plans to major in computer science in college – possibly at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, with its enticing cybersecurity management minor. He is also looking forward to building on his internship during the school year with the newly founded CyberPatriot competition team through the Marquette Air Force Junior ROTC (AFJROTC) program.

“The primary reason I did this internship was to help me along with that process of searching for colleges and deciding what I want to do in my future,” Buscher said. “This has been a big help. A lot of the things I’ve learned are pretty applicable to me: cybersecurity skills and things I should know.”

In addition to the threat assessment program, Buscher is working to remove some of the more obvious multifactor authentication questions from across the company. Think, “What is your favorite pet’s name?”, “What is your mother’s maiden name?” and others that hackers may glean from public documents without much trouble.

This is the third time McCarthy has hosted a cybersecurity PIE intern, and McCrary said Buscher is continuing the company’s stellar experiences with Rockwood students.

“The program has turned out some talented kids. They’re really engaged and want to learn,” she said. “It’s a great program, and we definitely want to make sure that we cultivate that talent for the future. This almost gives him that leg up of, once he learns the practical knowledge in school, he’ll also have some of the real-life knowledge and expertise to help him in his career.

“And hopefully, down the road, when our interns graduate and if we have roles open, we would love for them to come back and fill our talent pool, too.”