Cybersecurity Awareness

This contributed volume tells the story of the establishment of a cybersecurity awareness framework for organizations, and how it was piloted in two public sector municipal contexts. It presents a clear picture of cybersecurity issues in municipalities and proposes a socio-technical solution for creating cybersecurity awareness, how to build the solution and what the impact is on the municipal contexts. The 9 chapters for this book also provide information regarding the design, the deployment and the evaluation of the technology.

This book builds on the success of the European Horizon 2020 research and innovation project CS-AWARE. The research proposes the first cybersecurity situational awareness solution for local public administrations  based on an analysis of the context, provides automatic incident detection and visualization, and enables information exchange with relevant national and EU level authorities involved in legislation and network security.

Cybersecurity is one of the most challenging security problems for commercial companies, NGOs, governmental institutions as well as individuals. Reaching beyond the technology focused boundaries of classical information technology (IT) security, cybersecurity includes organizational and behavioral aspects of IT systems and that needs to comply to legal and regulatory framework for cybersecurity. While large corporations might have the resources to follow those developments and bring their IT infrastructure and services in line with the requirements, the burden for smaller organizations like local public administrations will be substantial and the required resources might not be available. New and innovative solutions that would help local public administration to ease the burden of being in line with cybersecurity requirements are needed.

This book targets researchers working in cybersecurity, computer scientists, social scientists and advanced level students studying computer science and other related disciplines. Cybersecurity professionals as well as professionals working in local government contexts, including policy makers, communication experts and system administrators will also benefit from this book.