Where this came from
The first assignment
was OSINT.
CyberWeb began as a senior design project at Cedarville University in 2024. Before anyone touched a network, the team was handed an open-source intelligence problem, working only from what anyone can look up, with conspiracy theories as the material. It taught that confidence isn't evidence. That's still the argument.
It started with an email and an open brief.
On August 16, 2024, Dr. Seth Hamman at Cedarville University asked Adam Dyer whether he would advise a senior design team of cyber operations majors. The idea on the table was a security service run out of the campus cyber lab, doing penetration testing and malware scanning for other organizations. Past that, the brief was open. The students would decide the rest.
- August 16, 2024 The email. Advise a senior design team building a security service for other organizations. Scope open past the first two services.
- August 29, 2024 First meeting, in the campus library. Four seniors: Anna Kauffmann, Ariella Vanderlaan, Stephen Pearson and Ethan Hunter.
- September 6, 2024 A team evening at Adam's house. A spider sat on the wall by the door on the way in. It became the name, and then the logo.
- Fall 2024 Six proposed services cut to three, because two semesters wasn't enough time for six.
- Spring 2025 Three trial installations at real organizations. One stayed running.
- April 23, 2025 Final presentation. The project ended and the four went their separate ways.
- May 5, 2025 CyberWeb Services launched as an LLC, on the argument that the need the project found was real and nobody local was meeting it.
The first assignment
OSINT first. Networks later.
Take a claim with an enormous public record and noise piled on top of it. Work out what is known, what is only asserted, and how you tell the two apart. Then defend a conclusion in front of the room. The topic was conspiracies.
That material is the cleanest practice ground there is for the problem. The evidence is public, the volume is enormous, and what is true sits underneath layers of confident assertion. It was an odd way to open a cybersecurity project and it was deliberate. The drill was not about security knowledge. It was about holding ambiguous information without swallowing all of it or dismissing all of it, and knowing the difference between having enough and being led.
That isn't a skill we train into staff. It's the skill behind the list somebody hands them, and it took a while to notice it had been the point from the first week.
Attackers don't send you an obviously fake email. They send something plausible at a moment when it fits, and what helps then isn't a verdict on whether it's real. It's knowing in advance that this kind of request waits for a call, so nobody has to decide under pressure.
TopSix services, then three.
The first proposal listed six: local network protection, system monitoring, security awareness training, user account monitoring, email account monitoring, and virus and malware scanning. Two semesters wasn't enough time to build six of those properly, so the team cut it to network protection, content filtering and awareness training.
What they built for the first two was a Dell Optiplex Micro, a small desktop computer running pfSense, which is free firewall software. It sat where the internet enters the building. They called it the Marc device, after the demarcation point: the spot where the provider's line ends and the building's begins. Traffic ran through it, logs went up to a cloud platform, and crossing a threshold raised an alert.
They pitched it to five organizations, four of them churches and a regional Baptist association. They installed it at three. One of those installations was still running when the project ended.
Why that number is on the page
Three installs and one that stayed isn't an impressive figure. It's the real one. A student project claiming much more than that is describing a demo. It's worth writing down because the one that stayed is what turned an academic exercise into a company.
What changed
We argue something different now.
WAS Sell managed protection to organizations that have none.
IS Train the people, and cover the essentials behind them.
The senior design project was built to sell protection. Hardware where the internet comes in, filtering, monitoring, a tier for every budget. That's a real service and we still run it for small organizations with nobody doing IT, but it's a floor now rather than the business. Where an organization already has an IT provider, we'd rather back them up than replace them. Where it has outgrown the basics and has nobody, we introduce it to one.
The training is the product. Not training that asks staff to become accurate at telling real from fake, which is a job the profession has not solved for itself. Training that names the moments where they stop, call and wait.
TopWho runs it
Adam Dyer
Founder. Information security analyst, Cedarville University
Nearly twenty years in the field, more than fifteen of them supporting the Department of Defense. Responding to email scams aimed at an organization's money, and building sign-in systems meant to hold up when somebody attacks them. The person who wrote the approach is the same one who takes the call at four in the afternoon asking whether a wire transfer request is legitimate. He'd rather get that call before something goes wrong than clean up after it does.
Not just an IT security guy. A coach. A coach doesn't play the game, and that difference is the whole approach: get people ready before the request arrives, then take the call when it comes.
Where the line in the footer comes from.
The name went through CedarMSSP and CUSafe before SafetyWeb, and SafetyWeb became CyberWeb. The mission statement took a similar route, and the second version is the one that still sets the terms.
Top"CyberWeb provides fractional cybersecurity services for organizations with limited resources, allowing our clients to focus on their mission without being burdened by securing their digital assets."
The first mission statement, written in 2024. It describes a service. It was rewritten on May 20, 2025 to describe the people instead, and that rewrite is where the line at the bottom of every page comes from.
Next
The rest of it is the argument.
The origin explains where the idea came from. The approach explains why it is right, and what it asks your people to do instead.