TY - JOUR
T1 - The core cyber-defense knowledge, skills, and abilities that cybersecurity students should learn in school
T2 - Results from interviews with cybersecurity professionals
AU - Jones, Keith S.
AU - Namin, Akbar Siami
AU - Armstrong, Miriam E.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. DGE-1516636. Authors’ addresses: K. S. Jones and M. E. Armstrong, Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Box 42051, Lubbock, TX 79409-2051; emails: {keith.s.jones, miriam.armstrong}@ttu.edu; A. S. Namin, Department of Computer Science, Texas Tech University, Box 43104, Lubbock, TX 79409-3104; email: akbar.namin@ttu.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2018 ACM 1946-6226/2018/08-ART11 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3152893
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 ACM.
PY - 2018/8
Y1 - 2018/8
N2 - Our cybersecurity workforce needs surpass our ability to meet them. These needs could be mitigated by developing relevant curricula that prioritize the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) most important to cybersecurity jobs. To identify the KSAs needed for performing cybersecurity jobs, we administered survey interviews to 44 cyber professionals at the premier hacker conferences Black Hat 2016 andDEF CON 24. Questions concerned 32 KSAs related to cyber defense. Participants rated how important each KSA was to their job and indicated where they had learned that KSA. Fifteen of these KSAs were rated as being of higher-thanneutral importance. Participants also answered open-ended questions meant to uncover additional KSAs that are important to cyber-defense work. Overall, the data suggest that KSAs related to networks, vulnerabilities, programming, and interpersonal communication should be prioritized in cybersecurity curricula.
AB - Our cybersecurity workforce needs surpass our ability to meet them. These needs could be mitigated by developing relevant curricula that prioritize the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) most important to cybersecurity jobs. To identify the KSAs needed for performing cybersecurity jobs, we administered survey interviews to 44 cyber professionals at the premier hacker conferences Black Hat 2016 andDEF CON 24. Questions concerned 32 KSAs related to cyber defense. Participants rated how important each KSA was to their job and indicated where they had learned that KSA. Fifteen of these KSAs were rated as being of higher-thanneutral importance. Participants also answered open-ended questions meant to uncover additional KSAs that are important to cyber-defense work. Overall, the data suggest that KSAs related to networks, vulnerabilities, programming, and interpersonal communication should be prioritized in cybersecurity curricula.
KW - And Abilities
KW - Cyber-Defense
KW - Cybersecurity Curricula
KW - Cybersecurity Education
KW - Cybersecurity Workforce Framework
KW - Knowledge
KW - Skills
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85051859382&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3152893
DO - 10.1145/3152893
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85051859382
SN - 1946-6226
VL - 18
JO - ACM Transactions on Computing Education
JF - ACM Transactions on Computing Education
IS - 3
M1 - 3152893
ER -