Demand for cybersecurity professionals from industry and institutions is high, driven by an increasing digitization of society and the growing range of potential targets for cyber attacks. However, despite this pressing need a significant shortfall in the number of cybersecurity experts remains and a discrepancy has emerged between the skills introduced through education and those required in professional settings. In this article, a political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) analysis was utilized to explore the factors impacting cybersecurity education in Europe. The PESTLE analysis enabled the categorization of factors affecting cybersecurty education and skills and allowed for cybersecurity professionals to assess the relevance of the factors at a national-level and European-level. Utilizing the concept of modularity from social network analysis, the interconnectivity of factors was also considered. Finally, a European-level stakeholder survey was conducted to verify the findings. As a result of the above process, a lack of societal awareness of cybersecurity was identified as a major challenge to education, along with a lack of EU-level certification. It should be noted that significant differences between factors perceived as impacting cybersecurity education were found between countries suggesting a need for local solutions to the problem.

Cybersecurity has become important, especially during the last decade. The significant growth of information technologies, internet of things, and digitalization in general, increased the interest in cybersecurity professionals significantly. While the demand for cybersecurity professionals is high, there is a significant shortage of these professionals due to the very diverse landscape of knowledge and the complex curriculum accreditation process. In this article, we introduce a novel AI-driven mapping and optimization solution enabling cybersecurity curriculum development. Our solution leverages machine learning and integer linear programming optimization, offering an automated, intuitive, and user-friendly approach. It is designed to align with the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF) released by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) in 2022. Notably, our innovative mapping methodology enables the seamless adaptation of ECSF to existing curricula and addresses evolving industry needs and trend. We conduct a case study using the university curriculum from Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic to showcase the efficacy of our approach. The results demonstrate the extent of curriculum coverage according to ECSF profiles and the optimization progress achieved through our methodology.

Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) utilize different sensors and various embedded systems to operate. Devices often communicate using protocols like Siemens Step 7 and Modbus, which were designed for use in closed networks many years ago and are vulnerable to attacks. The goal of this study is to detect anomalies in industrial control systems using a proximity-based approach on the Securing Water Treatment (SWaT) dataset. We encoded categorical data using one hot encoding and normalized numerical data using min max scaling. The experiment shown that by adopting a proximity-based approach, we can obtain state-of-the-art 99% precision and 98% recall and able to identify 35 out of 37 attack points, indicating that the suggested methodology is suitable for usage in industrial control system scenarios.

Digitalization of society brought improvement in many aspects of life but it also brought new cybersecurity challenges. The number of sophisticated, targeted cyber attacks is increasing, which requires constant improvements in Cybersecurity education. Despite this pressing need, the cybersecurity workforce gap is getting bigger. This paper presents a new approach for dynamic cybersecurity curriculum development that utilizes keyword extraction from various sources such as job ads, courses, and curricula with machine learning to quantify curriculum alignment with cybersecurity industry demands and address the workforce gap. The analysis illustrates curricula in the Central East Europe (CEE) region, maps cyber security job ads to curricula, and quantifies coverage of courses, industry, and reference framework topics based on keyword matching. The case study conducted with curricula from CEE illustrates coverage according to the ENISA's European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF) roles and optimization progress after adjustment application. The results demonstrate the importance of dynamic curriculum updates for academic institutions including cybersecurity workforce gap reduction and lack of real progress towards alignment with ECSF.