Cybersecurity and Cyber Defense in the Classroom

The inclusion of soft skills linked to cybersecurity and cyber defense in the academic curricula of higher education courses is a very current issue. Several studies have been carried out in this regard given the increasing importance of creating awareness about good practices in accessing computer networks, particularly the Internet. However, the conclusions of these studies are generally limited to determining a set of recommendations on good practices to build the academic curriculum of the course. The approach we take here is from the perspective of the students who may be the target of these cybersecurity skills. In this sense, we are developing a study in several Portuguese higher education institutions, to understand what higher education students think about this issue and their perception of the need to have training in the area, where we will question students from various areas of education on this topic. We will then present the preliminary results of a pilot test study where we questioned 423 students from the Informatics Engineering Degree course.