Building Security Awareness Programs for Online Education

by Greg Belding on November 29, 2018

Introduction

Security awareness programs are an important aspect of the training offered at universities, schools, organizations and the like. While you certainly know the reasons why security awareness programs exist, the truth is that some people don’t stop to think about what is required to build a security awareness program, let alone those specifically for online education.

This article will detail why online education needs security awareness, what some of the unique challenges are, what the current landscape of online education security looks like, and where to begin when building out a SA program for online education.

Please note: This article is intended to address online security awareness programs for online educational institutions. Some may have arrived at this article thinking that it will focus on online security awareness programs — programs such as these are (relatively) long-established and agreed-upon as trustworthy paths toward security awareness certification.

Why Does Online Education Need Security Awareness?

Online education needs security awareness even more so than traditional classroom education, because of the very nature of online education. Being entirely online not only entails that all of the learning is done online, but also that the administration process (such as applying to the online school) is done online as well. As will be discussed later in this article, another problem is that this centralization of information leads to just one or two points of attack, such as an online learning portal, makes information security all the more important for online learning.

Flying in the face of this is the fact that many online educational institutions currently provide insufficient security awareness programs due to unaddressed information security weaknesses in online education itself.