EDUCSIRT (EDU Computer Security Incident Response Team)
The use of the internet has grown substantially among school students in the last decade. Although the Internet can be considered as the world’s largest resource repository, the threats associated with it cannot be underestimated. It is difficult to overcome all the threats by using only technology since many of these incidences are caused by users who don’t know how to manage their privacy and access privileges. This could be mitigated to a great extent if the users could be provided with the proper awareness on managing their security.
The ICT Branch of Ministry of Education had started awareness campaigns with Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team since 2011. However, this alone will not suffice to cover total intended target group.
To address this, ICTA in collaboration with the Ministry of Education ICT Branch, Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team (SL CERT), the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched the EDUCSIRT (EDU Computer Security Incident Response Team) initiative to establish a trainers pool empowered by comprehensive training towards forming school level internet readiness teams.
Seven four day residential workshops from year 2016 to 2017 were conducted at in Hotel Mirage, Colombo 06 with the involvement of around 500 participants.
Teachers from zonal and provincial ICT centers, dedicated ICT teachers and ICT in service advisors from all islands were selected to train through these residential workshops and these workshops were conducted by technical experts in the domain.
The program was conducted interactively with group activities, presentations and Q&A sessions. Participants actively participated in all the activities. They gained immense knowledge on the domain towards bringing together a Core Leadership Group of cybersecurity experts to recommend actions that could improve the cybersecurity workforce pipeline. The participants acknowledged the workshop, as a great opportunity to brainstorm and to speak candidly of lessons learned about things that worked and things that did not work in their own experiences.
