Challenges and reflections in designing Cyber security curriculum

Abstract

Recently it has been noticed an increased number of cyber-incidents, sometimes causing seriously impact to organizations and governments. Cyberattacks exploits a variety of technological and social vulnerabilities to achieve a malicious objective. The emergence of new and sophisticated Cyberthreats demand very skilled operators with a solid knowledge about concepts and technologies related to Cybersecurity and Cyberdefense. However, the landscape of this base knowledge is very diverse in nature, requiring agile learning methods, besides a very demanding training process limited by the intrinsic technology's complexity and broad range of application domains. Although existing Cybersecurity and Cyberdefense curricula spans a wide array of topics and training strategies, its programs content lack focus on some particular aspect, like depth of education/training and its link to professional development. This paper intends to provide some reflections regarding the curricula contents that should be considered when a graduate level curriculum in cybersecurity is designed.