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. 

Dr Jerry Andriessen is an experienced researcher (in the learning sciences) and project manager, with more than 100 journal and book publications on children’s writing, collaboration and collaborative learning, technology in education, argumentative discourse, and arguing to learn. Coordinated the LEAD – 6th framework project, and participated as local project leader in 6 other EU projects since 2000. He was project manager in 3 EU-funded Research and Innovation projects and scientific coordinator in the legendary KP-Lab project. Participated in the design of 3 ICT environments for supporting argumentation (Digalo, Drew, and CoFFEE). Was visiting scientist at the universities of Poitiers, St. Etienne, and Lyon. He is an expert in qualitative and quantitative techniques for analysing interactions during collaborative learning activities. Experienced in teacher training workshops. His role in the CS-AWARE project was the elaboration of the user perspective, which includes their organisation, their objectives and expectations, conducting and analysing usability trials, and the evaluation of the actual impact of the technology on the users and their organisation. He is currently the director of Wise & Munro Learning Research (est. 2008), dedicated to supporting users in the design and appropriation of interactive technology. His latest main publication is a monograph on collaboration (together with Michael Baker).

Dr Thomas Schaberreiter earned his Master’s degree in Telematics with distinction from the Graz University of Technology (Austria) in 2009. In 2013, he received his PhD as a double degree from the University of Oulu (Finland) and the University of Luxembourg. During his PhD studies he was working at the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor in Luxembourg. His PhD topic was centred around Critical Infrastructure Protection, with a focus on proposing an on­line risk monitoring and prediction framework that highlights the interdependencies among critical infrastructures and the diversity of critical infrastructure sectors, based on a Bayesian model. Thomas has been working at the Oulu University Secure Programming Group (OUSPG) as a post­doctoral researcher till 2016, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Multimedia Information Systems (MIS) research group of the University of Vienna ­ Faculty of Computer Science till 12/2020. His current professional interest lies in the security of complex systems and networks.

Dr Alexandros Papanikolaou is CEO & Co-founder of InnoSec, a company specialising in information security services. He is a researcher in the wider field of Information Security with more than 15 years of experience. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Cryptography and Information Security, both from Aston University (Birmingham, UK). He has participated in research projects related to Cyber Security, network security and embedded systems security, and has produced more than 30 publications on these topics. His research interests include the evolution of cryptographic techniques and their applications, IoT security and intelligent intrusion detection systems.

Prof Juha Röning is Professor of Embedded Systems at the University of Oulu. He serves also as Visiting Professor of Tianjin University of Technology, P. R. China. He is principal investigator of the Biomimetics and Intelligent Systems Group (BISG). In 1985 he received an Asla/Fullbright scholarship. From 1985 to 1986 he was a visiting research scientist in the Centre for Robotic Research at the University of Cincinnati. From 1986 to 1989 he held a Young Researcher Position in the Finnish Academy. In 2000 he was nominated as Fellow of SPIE. He has three patents and has published more than 300 papers in the areas of computer vision, robotics, intelligent signal analysis, and software security. He was a steering board member of ARTMIS-IA 2017-2022. He is currently serving as a Board of Director for euRobotics aisbl and Adra.