Fighting Hackers and Other Virtual Villains with

Cybersecurity Expert

Vickie McLain

by Andrea Busche

Valarie

“Vickie” McLain is a woman of varied interests. She can comfortably discuss horse training, cybersecurity, building a house, and motherhood, transitioning from subject to subject with authority and ease.

Millinocket, Maine, formerly home to the Great Northern Paper Mill, is known as “the town that paper built.” Vickie and her brother Steven were raised in this sleepy town, where their parents both worked as x-ray technicians.

Vickie’s unique interests emerged early. She loved playing with her chemistry set, reading the dictionary, and riding her pony, Rosie.

Vickie was a natural with horses and won a ribbon at the first horse show she attended. She accumulated many more awards over the years, and at age fifteen was awarded a citizenship trip to Washington, DC, for her work with 4H.

With plans to study pre-veterinary medicine, Vickie enrolled at the University of Maine-Orono. After seeing a bit of blood and gore, however, she knew this wasn’t the field for her. She changed her major to Animal Science and Medical Technology.

Nerd + Jock?

Shortly after high school graduation, Vickie met her future husband, Fred McLain, when they worked together at the paper mill. Although they attended high school together, they didn’t run in the same circles.

While Vickie focused on her studious interests, Fred, captain of the basketball team, appeared to be a simple jock, but Vickie was surprised to learn of his intellect and sensitivity. “He wasn’t who I thought he was,” she says.

After college graduation, Vickie began working in a hospital as a medical technologist. The McLains welcomed two of their three children, Aaron and Justin, while still in Maine.

By the time Justin arrived, the mill was struggling financially. Fred would have had to take a demotion in order to keep his job. He had heard about a new mill that was opening in Duluth. He applied and got the job. The McLains left behind everything they knew in Maine for their Minnesota adventure.

Vickie took some time off to get the family established in Minnesota. The McLains built two homes in Esko. To save money, Vickie was the general contractor for both projects, learning about the building process as she went along.

Once their youngest child Shauna was five, Vickie went back to work as a medical technologist. Making a move that would change the course of her entire career, she decided to go back to school to earn a teaching certificate.

Destined to Teach

Vickie’s first teaching job was for Esko High School, where she taught biology, earth science, and careers classes. She was eventually hired as the technology coordinator for the Carlton School District.

Vickie shares, “One of the first things I had to do was install Ethernet cards in the computers. I had never installed anything in a computer before that time, so I wasn’t quite sure if it would work, but it did.” She found her niche with technology and earned a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology Leadership from George Washington University.

Cybersecurity Guru

Today, Vickie is a professor at Lake Superior College (LSC) and an adjunct professor at The College of St. Scholastica. Her area of expertise is cybersecurity, which, in a nutshell, involves preventing hackers from entering cyber systems.

“Cybersecurity is something I fell into by accident,” she shares. “At first, I wasn’t sure how much I even knew about cybersecurity, because I didn’t realize how broad the field is. As it turned out, as a former network administrator, I had done plenty of cybersecurity work already.”

In addition to her work as a professor, Vickie is the coach for the LSC Cybersecurity Team. The team works together on lifelike scenarios where they must prevent hackers from entering the system. They finished in first place in the Collegiate State Cybersecurity Competition in both 2014 and 2015.

In 2014, Vickie initiated the LSC GenCyber summer camp, where children grades 7-12 can learn the ins and outs of cybersecurity. Additionally, Vickie, along with Dr. Tirthankar Ghosh from St. Cloud State and Dave Keller from Century College, worked together to co-write a grant, providing LSC students full scholarships in the field. Many of the students have gone on to make cybersecurity the focus of their careers; jobs in this field are highly lucrative.

While cybersecurity can seem pretty technical, Vickie shares her number one tip: “If you have anything you want to keep secret, don’t put it on your computer.”

She is passionate about keeping cyber systems safe. This issue is much bigger than just private computers, however; hackers have attacked water and power plants, which could affect millions of people. Vickie would eventually like to offer a community education course on the subject.

“The military now states that cyber is the fourth war ‘theater’ after air, land, and sea,” Vickie says. “They expect future wars to be fought with cyber weapons. Just learning how to protect your own computer or workplace will help protect the rest of us.” D

by Sheryl Jensen

HTK, an integrated area marketing firm, specializes in hospitals, health systems, and non-profits. Their purpose, as they describe it, is simply to “create a healthy world.”

As part of their outward thinking community focus, the company has established the HTK Workshop to connect area non-profits with college senior marketing, graphic design, and communications students. The premise is that one area non-profit organization per semester is paired with a team of three students: one account manager, one writer, and one art director to work on a comprehensive marketing plan at no cost to the selected non-profit organization.