How to Educate to Build an Effective Cyber Resilient Society

The possibility that computers, in particular, personal computers, can be used for harmful actions affecting global computer systems as a whole, due to two main reasons: (1) hardware and / or software failures, which are caused by problems related to their manufacture which must be solved by their respective manufacturers and (2) failures due to actions or inactions of their users, in particular people with low computer skills, people of very low age groups, e.g. children, or very old age groups, e.g. ageing people, or others without a minimum of computer skills. This problem is aggravated by the continuous proliferation of equipment, namely mobile devices, IOT devices and others that have Internet connectivity, namely through a browser. There are the possible ways in the area of cyber education that can contribute to cyber resilience of society and these are developed in this work.

Experiential Cyber Education

There is a gap between available cyber professionals with necessary skills and experience to meet industry requirements. Institutions of higher education (IHE)—as well as other programs—have begun increasing course and degree offerings to help educate, train, and even retrain working professionals to close this gap. Of growing importance are tools and techniques to supplement theoretical development with accelerated experiential cyber training. Fortunately, there has been an increase in providers offering these services, although they vary substantially in features, costs, and opportunities. The purpose of this research is to identify a current spectrum of vendors and opportunities providing hands-on cyber training. The authors of this paper include cyber faculty at a university offering undergraduate and master's cybersecurity degrees. Both degrees are offered to resident as well as online students.

Incorporating Cyber Principles into Middle and High School Curriculum

Although many practicing teachers have not experienced teacher preparation programs that teach cyber security (Pusely & Sadera, 2011) or are familiar with cyber principles (Author), embedding these ideas into instruction in a variety of content areas is essential for promoting cyber literacy and citizenship. This study explores a professional development program that provided middle and high school teachers across disciplines with opportunities to explore, first as learners and then as educators, cyber citizenship and programming concepts with explicit connections to the cybersecurity principles and concepts. Participating teachers experienced inquiry-based learning, focused classroom discourse, and collaborative learning that centered on GenCyber Cybersecurity First Principles and GenCyber Cybersecurity Concepts (GenCyber, 2019). Results indicated the professional development enabled teachers to iteratively reflect on best practices in cyber education while learning and applying the content of GenCyber Principles within the context of their own field of study.

Educational modules and research surveys on critical cybersecurity topics

Cybersecurity comprised all the technologies and practices that protect data as well as computer and network systems. In this article, we develop four course modules on critical cybersecurity topics that can be adopted in college-level cybersecurity courses in which these topics are covered. Our goal for developing these course modules with the hands-on labs is to increase students’ understanding and hands-on experiences on these critical topics that support cyber skills development for college students. The hands-on labs are designed to enhance students’ engagement and provide them hands-on experiences with real-world cyber activities to augment their cyber education of both foundational and advanced skills. We also conduct research surveys on the most-recent significant research in these critical cybersecurity fields. These cybersecurity course modules with the labs are also designed to help college/university professors enhance and update their cybersecurity course content, activities, hands-on lab exercises, and pedagogical methods, as well as emphasize the cyber skills to meet today’s pressing cybersecurity education needs for college students. Our proposed cybersecurity modules with hands-on labs will also help building the nation’s cybersecurity workforce.