The impact of educational training on improving the vigilance of public officials against cyber-attacks

Abstract

Cybersecurity today is a phenomenon of global and multidimensional proportions. Protecting against cyber-attacks is a challenge for governments and the private sector. Increasing the security and protection of data and critical infrastructure against cyber-attacks is one of the essential factors of an institution that manages confidential data. The authors first present the findings from the research conducted regarding the skills that public officials have on various risks from cyber-attacks. The authors then present the results from testing the skills of public officials through the simulation of two cyber-attacks and the method applied by one public institution in Kosovo (as case study for this research is used Ministry of Internal Affairs - MIA) to raise the awareness of its officials about the various risks of cyber-attacks. Also, this paper focuses on analyzing the results before and after increasing the skills of MIA officials against cyber-attacks, as well as giving concrete recommendations from the results and analyses made. The presented results show that the applied method for raising the awareness of public officials on the risks of cyber-attacks has given impressive results. The obtained results are supported by statistics obtained from the conducted tests.