Every field of study has its challenges, and cybersecurity education faces a big one: how can educators can share detailed curricula around things like malware and cyberattacks without serving up a potential recipe book for those with ill intent?
Sensitive information shared with the wrong people in the classroom (physical or online) can fuel a malicious actor’s own educational learning curve. That’s obviously something to be avoided, but cybersecurity educators and their students still need to find a way to study concepts and use cases at the level of granularity sufficient for the real-world jobs they’re training for.
Related: Is your cybersecurity program on track?
Let’s take a closer look at how to strike the right balance in cybersecurity education.
Keeping black hats out of the classroom
The increasingly online and globally-connected nature of cybersecurity education is bringing more people to the field. That’s a good thing, but it requires a renewed focus on vetting curricula and understanding students’ interests and goals. The more we can do this, the more we guard against misuse of coursework by potential threat actors.
Ken Underhill, CEH, CHFI is a Master Instructor who works with Cybrary to deliver a combination of on-demand and live Cybersecurity offerings to students around the world. Ken believes that everyone should be provided the opportunity to an affordable, high-quality education. Ken is a certified ethical hacker, computer hacking forensic investigator, and exam reviewer for EC-Council on both the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator (CHFI) exams.
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