Mapping the Known Unknowns of Cybersecurity Education
What is taught in a course on cybersecurity? In this paper, CSS Senior Researcher Max Smeets, Trey Herr and Arthur Laudrain address this question by reviewing two dozen university syllabi to identify key literature in the field, create an overview of best practices, as well as identify core concepts and readings.
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As cybersecurity increases in importance to societies around the world, it is increasingly appearing in national debates and headlines. This trend is also reflected in the curricula of colleges and universities, which are now starting to include cybersecurity as explicit courses of study. The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of what is taught in a course on cyber conflict and to highlight some trends that may manifest themselves in the long run. In order to do so, the authors examine patterns and variations in the content of syllabi on cybersecurity courses.
Central themes and readings on syllabi
The authors find that although no two courses cover the same material, some overlap in central themes, with cyber warfare, cyber terrorism, espionage and surveillance being amongst the most popular topics. However, reading lists differed wildly across academic institutions. Indeed, the authors write that two students at different universities could each read more than 30 articles in their semester-long courses and still not cover the same particular works.
In sum, while cybersecurity does not have the characteristics of a coherent field of study, the array of topics it covers has grown in importance and gained public attention over the past decade. In order to improve the framing of cybersecurity courses, the authors recommend, among other things, for instructors to categorize readings to ease course development, seek works or comparable syllabi that serve as a foundation to build their course upon, and include industry reports to allow for an insight into the community of analysts and firms involved in cybersecurity.