Evaluating and Enhancing Cybersecurity Awareness and Training Programs in Middle Eastern Universities: A Post-COVID Perspective

The Security Awareness and Training (SAT) program enables organizational members to understand the organization’s security strategies, know their responsibilities, and control risks that are caused by security incidents. The need for this program has reached an all-time high since COVID-19, which has led organizations to conduct their operations online. One of the most affected fields was the educational field which needed to shift its methods from conventional methods to online learning and teaching pedagogies. Therefore, implementing an SAT program is a critical step for any institution to assure that information assets are appropriately secured. The aim of this chapter is divided into folds: first, to gain an insight and determine the information security awareness and training program levels in the Middle Eastern higher education sector through a case study that examined 182 institute websites over eight countries that were examined before and after COVID-19. Second, to provide recommendations based on the findings that aid information security professionals to establish a new awareness and training program or improve an existing one. Literature showed that no study has been done on the SAT program at the level of the entire Middle Eastern region specifically before COVID-19. However, there was a need for this investigation and therefore, it was a pioneering study at the regional level in the field of information security. The result showed improvements in deploying the SAT program after COVID-19.