Hands-on labs are a critical component of any cybersecurity program. Schools can develop labs internally, outsource labs to a provider, or utilize free grant resourced labs, or use free and open source labs.  Many externally provided labs aren’t mapped to CAE Knowledge Units or the NICE Framework, especially the open source labs. This makes it challenging for schools to identify the right labs for their program and requires extensive efforts to map the labs to meet these different requirements.

Cybersecurity has become a prevalent topic in many colleges, but how it should fit into the overall educational process is still not fully understood. A cybersecurity project at the University of Hawaii Maui College (UHMC), funded by the NSF SFS program, spans multiple disciplines and targets women and minorities. The goal of this project is to ensure that a broad audience of faculty, students and practitioners get trained in the fundamentals of cybersecurity.

The field of cybersecurity is predicated on the existence of humans who deliberately attack computer systems. In other words, without cyber adversaries, there is no cybersecurity.

The Joint Task Force (JTF) on Cybersecurity Education (http://cybered.acm.org/) was launched in September, 2015 as a collaboration between major international computing societies: ACM, IEEE Computer Society, AIS’s Special Interest Group on Security (SIGSEC), and IFIP. The purpose of the JTF on Cybersecurity Education was to develop comprehensive model curricular recommendations for undergraduate program in cybersecurity education that will support future program development, and associated educational efforts.