Cybersecurity Education €“ The New Literacy

The present paper aims to underline the mandatory shift in higher education, especially, in order to include cybersecurity elements at all levels and domains of study. The nowadays almost complete reliance on electronic devices for sources of information, means of communications, utilities, research and even shopping, at some extent, bears a powerful emphasis on securing these electronic devices as best as possible. Besides the intrinsic security features and capabilities that are built into the hardware devices or programmed into different software applications, the human resources training and level of awareness towards the issue are critical. Even for students outside of the fields of study such as computer science, electronics, or informatics, at least a good level of general knowledge and awareness about cybersecurity issues like type of attacks, means of protection, basic rules of conduct regarding received files etc. becomes mandatory. The widespread knowledge about these issues, at higher education level within non-computer science related domains might exponentially increase the global level of security. The future highly skilled workforce of tomorrow would already be aware of the dangers and even able to avoid them, at least the most often encountered ones.