A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CYBER-SECURITY KNOWLEDGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTES OF FIVE COUNTRIES

Cyber-security knowledge is becoming increasingly significant for everyday’s online activities, while there is no adequate knowledge offered for their safe use in education. Individuals and organizations utilise cyber-security knowledge in various uses and various ways. It is important to understand how security and privacy issues are perceived and handled by learners, IT professionals and citizens of different cultures. The authors of this paper researched and identified different needs and uses and different reasons for acting so among the previous groups of people in five countries.

The aim herein is to present and scrutinize information by learners (prospective IT professionals) of five countries, namely China, Finland, Greece, Nepal, and the UK. In particular the researchers wanted to find out about the future IT professionals’ knowledge, conceptualisations and awareness of cyber-security regarding the use of cloud-based services by current IT students in higher education degree schemes and curricula about cyber-security. The authors further illustrate the research findings by proceeding to a comparative analysis taking into account different perspectives such as: gender, higher education, national culture and IT-related knowledge. The final research outcomes reveal interesting information for future IT professionals’ skills, knowledge, and digital competencies. The latter comprise a body of realistic and practical knowledge for the IT professional communities to consider when designing cyber-security curricula.

Hence, for advancing the IT professionals’ role, cyber-security curricula designers should provide practical knowledge and socially acceptable solutions by i) incorporating real needs (e.g. cryptography-based cloud security) and ii) considering cultural awareness (values and national culture) in higher education degrees and related industrial training schemes.