The Cyber Security and Disaster Management programme seeks to develop the knowledge and skills required for middle to senior managers from a broad range of organisations such as government agencies, national and international industries, emergency and medical services, academia, small to medium sized industries, faith based and local community organisations, with current or future responsibility for disaster management. The education and training of disaster management is in its infancy in many countries. As a consequence many graduates of overseas universities seek a postgraduate qualification in countries where the study of disaster management and the development of crisis management and emergency management professionals is more advanced. Moreover, the same can be said about the emergence of the global effects of cybercrime and the international response to cyber incident which is discovered and exploited within the offered cyber security units.
Program Modules:-
Developing Policies and Plans – Module 1
To develop in participants’ a systematic understanding of Disaster Management and to assist them in a solid and critical awareness of the national and international current best practices in developing national disaster management policies and plans.
Managing Technological, Social and Intentional Disasters – Module 2
To develop in participants’ an understanding of the nature and types of man-made (human instigated) hazards which affect their country (including on land, air, sea, crowd safety accidents, industrial accidents) and to assist them in a solid and critical awareness of the management issues associated with such man-made hazards set within a framework of major incident management and national planning.
Management of Natural Disasters – Module 3
To develop in participants’ an understanding of the nature; types and inter-connectedness of natural hazards (both with one another and with man-made disasters) which affect their country.
Cyber Security – Module 4
The role of this unit is to develop skills and knowledge of the techniques and technologies of cyber security. The material, lectures and seminars capture the concepts and context of various aspects of cyberspace ecosystems and the security of socio-technical systems. Developing independent thinking, exploiting experience and understanding, the unit covers the life cycle of cyber security mechanisms including the design, development, management, and most importantly, sustainment of these mechanisms.
Security Event & Incident Management – Module 5
Incident management capability is the ability to provide management of computer security events and incidents. Lectures and seminars will capture the concepts and context of event logging and collection with syslog protocol, regular expression language and its applications to system/network monitoring, event correlation, and finally network intrusion detection and prevention. Participants’ will learn to independently define policies, processes, procedures, roles and responsibilities and understand the issues of lead implementation of ISO 27001.
Information Assurance – Module 6
Participants will learn to critically evaluate the issues relevant to asset assurance and risk management. Also learning how to evaluate human factors pertinent to information assurance, information assurance plans, and understand the roles of roles of accreditation, compliance and governance in information assurance.
Dissertation/Final project
Students need to undertake a final project/Disertation at the end to complete the MSc Degree which will be allocated.
Delivery
The Disaster Management modules (1-3) are delivered over 5 days and the Cyber Security modules (4-6) are delivered over 3 days. Each module would be delivered as workshops at times to be arranged during the indicated timescale. The workshops would be one aspect of a blended learning approach which would also include a virtual learning environment, one-to-one email and telephone support and coaching from module tutors, linking theory with practice, work-based activities, personal study and work-based assignments. All the modules can be completed over a 30 week period, with the exception of the individual Masters project/dissertation which is not a taught module.
Qualification Achieved
On successful completion of each unit participant’s will be awarded 20 academic credits (M level – Masters/Postgraduate level). These credits can be built upon by undertaking other units which will make up a tailored postgraduate qualification. The following exit qualifications can be achieved:
- PG Cert in Disaster Management (Module 1-3)
- PG Cert in Cyber Security (Module 4-6)
- PG Diploma in Cyber Security and Disaster Management (Module 1-6)
- MSc in Cyber Security & Disaster Management (Module 1-6 + Dissertation/Final Project)