January/February 2018

Communities: Education
Cybersecurity Criteria Released for Comment

Check the news on any given day and chances are you’ll read about a new data breach or hack. Employers can’t hire workers with cybersecurity skills fast enough, declared a March 2017 Forbes.com article, “The Fast-Growing Job With a Huge Skills Gap.”

Engineering accreditation organization ABET is working on a solution for that.

Two separate sets of accreditation criteria, for cybersecurity engineering and cybersecurity for systems with a computing element, have now been released by ABET for public comment.

Since January 2016, a committee within IEEE has been working toward the creation of ABET criteria for cybersecurity engineering programs. The efforts on this and the other criteria incorporated work by the Cyber Education Project, a group of volunteers interested in accrediting educational programs in the cyber sciences. The group has been developing a case for such accreditation since 2014 and garnered funding from the National Science Foundation.

The cybersecurity engineering criteria also apply to engineering programs with words in their titles such as the following:

• “safety”;
• “computer security”;
• “cyber operations”;
• “information assurance”;
• “information security.”