A survey on cybersecurity awareness concerns, practices and conceptual measures

Abstract

Cybersecurity, a word that attained considerable attention and is regarded as most widely used term across all the domains that use internet. Recent technological advances have mandated the necessity of exploring various aspects of cybersecurity. Rapid cyberisation with the introduction of smart devices has enforced both government and private organizations to create an awareness on cyber threats and cybersecurity. Developed countries like New Zealand has been a frontrunner in introducing new technology and in some cases has legally mandated to implement cybersecurity procedures in various sectors including educational institutions. Though, the necessity of such implementations are never questioned, however, there has been a continues debate on implementation framework particularly for school, bursary and undergraduate syllabus.This paper is divided into three parts. Firstly, the importance of cybersecurity awareness is established by presenting various statistics, followed by the current implementations for cybersecurity awareness in terms of courses, seminars etc. The results of a comprehensive survey among various age groups is presented which gives a generic opinion on different implementations. Finally, we propose a framework that leads to the process of implementing cybersecurity awareness.The survey provides a comprehensive understand of cyber security awareness. This work will contributes on understanding the cyber security awareness state of internet users, what are important aspects and statistics to be collected as well as on the important concepts of internet security that are to be considered while designing a survey. Further, the conclusions obtained from the survey result will guide the new works on cyber security awareness programmes.