The Centre has launched a project for taking cyber security training and awareness to schools and colleges across the country, in a bid to curb cyber terrorism and other forms of cyber crimes.“The cyber security education awareness programme is an initiative of the Department of IT, Government of India, and its main purpose is to spread cyber security education right up to the informal and formal level of education,” said B J Srinath, senior director, Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India.The ministry will invest Rs 85 crore in this project to encourage the promotion of cyber security at different divisions of the educational system and to churn out technical experts for the future. The main purpose is to popularise the concept of cyber security, and to curb the possible threats the IT sector might face.The department is in the process of identifying educational resource centres, IITs, regional engineering institutions, ISI and others that will be able to implement the project by coming up with cyber security courses and research papers for students. The Centre aims at introducing cyber security courses in colleges such as certificates, diplomas and post graduate courses for students.“The ongoing service security and awareness project seeks to fill the resource gap that our country faces at present. With the introduction of such cyber security related course we will have experts in the diverse fields of auditing, managing, teaching and training, all of which is related to protect the communication and IT world against cyber crimes,” Srinath said. “We have enough centres throughout the country to develop cyber courses. The need is to transform it into a full-fledged stream,” an expert said.
