A Holistic and Case-Analysis Approach for Cybersecurity Education
Yu Cai · 2018
There is a growing acceptance that a holistic cybersecurity approach incorporating technical, human, and business factors is needed to address the myriad cyber threats nowadays. This paper introduces a new holistic and case-analysis (HCA) teaching approach for cybersecurity education by dissecting recent high-profile cybersecurity breaches. The traditional way of teaching cybersecurity usually introduces a list of technical security topics in an isolated context with little or no effort to link these topics together. It is also not easy to find a good place to teach human and business factors in cybersecurity. The proposed HCA model starts with selected real-world cyber breaches including the Target Corporation breach, the Anthem Inc. breach, and selected Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Students look into the details of these attacks and learn how these attacks took place from the beginning to the end. During the process of case analysis, a list of security topics reflecting different aspects of these breaches is introduced. Student learning will be reinforced through in-class discussion, selected readings materials, and hands-on labs. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed HCA model has a few advantages. First, it can draw students' attention and increase their interest with real-world cases. Second, it can improve student analytical skills by helping them obtain a whole picture of cybersecurity systems in an enterprise environment. Third, it can help the student gain a holistic view of cybersecurity by incorporating complicated socio-technical factors.