Last year, nude photos of celebrities were hacked through iCloud. Online robbers also made off with millions of credit card numbers at Home Depot and Target. By year-end, the latest Seth Rogen comedy was fueling an international imbroglio replete with tit-for-tat cyberattacks.

Welcome to Anton Dahbura’s world.

Dahbura is the executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, often known more simply by the acronym JHUISI, pronounced “juicy.” Its mission: Exploring ways to protect data and thwart cybercrime while pondering the very notion of what privacy means in our wired world. With nearly every single aspect of our society—from commerce, to entertainment, to health care, to democracy itself via computerized voting—reduced to “0s” and “1s” and placed on increasingly networked computers, the urgency of the task has never been greater.

Cybercrime is so omnipresent today, Dahbura jokes, that some of his instructors don’t have to lug books to class, or put together PowerPoint presentations. “They really don’t have to prepare their lectures in advance,” he says. “They just pick up the paper in the morning and lecture right off the front page.”