Assessing cybersecurity hygiene and cyber threats awareness in the campus: A case study of higher education institutions in Portugal and Poland

Abstract

Cybersecurity skills are of utmost importance to prevent or mitigate the impact of cyberattacks. In higher education, there are graduations related to Information Technology (IT), where students are expected to develop technical skills, including cybersecurity. Thus, it is relevant to assess students’ cybersecurity awareness regarding cybersecurity hygiene and cyber threats when they start their academic studies and to verify whether there are context-dependent differences. This paper presents the results of an assessment regarding the cybersecurity awareness level of 110 first-year students from computer science graduations from two different countries, Poland and Portugal. The assessment was designed as a survey divided into the following two main groups of questions: (1) awareness regarding cybersecurity hygiene and (2) awareness regarding major cyber threats considered in the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) 2021 cyber threat report. The survey results show that Polish and Portuguese students present different self-perceptions and knowledge regarding cybersecurity hygiene and knowledge of cybersecurity. In these areas, Polish students are generally more confident than Portuguese students. Also, Polish students presented better scores around 70%, against the ones obtained by the Portuguese students, scoring around 58%.