Multiple case study of cybersecurity threats and challenges of selected state colleges and universities: basis of program logic model for policy development/ Noly M. De Ramos

Dissertation

College of Industrial Education Doctor of Education in Industrial Education Management Technological University of the Philippines 2019

Cybersecurity threats, challenges are rising across all organizations as cyber-criminals, cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crimes, hackers, script kiddies and cyber-terrorism wore attempting to access sensitive data for despicable reasons including financial gain, identity theft and radical inspirations. Unfortunately, academic institutions are generally vulnerable to any cyberattacks primarily due to the open nature of numerous state colleges and universities infrastructures and funding concerns underlining preserving systems running rather than safeguarding conditions.
To address the cyber risks poses and better prepare the advanced strategies anchored in the National Cybersecurity Plan direction of systematically and methodically strengthen critical infrastructure resiliency, this study explores the multiple case study of cybersecurity threats and challenges of selected state universities and colleges as basis of program logic model for policy development. The program logic model as many experts agreed, served as guide to help communicate, formulate road map, illustrate a sequence of events, organize program, systematize planning, management, implementation and evaluation serve an effective tool that needed little resources is best suited to this study.
This research is a case study which employed a non-probabilistic purposive sampling to gather information and fruitful insights about the phenomenon under investigation from the informants Patton (2002). This is consistent with the study of Davers and Frankel (2000) as sample selection meet the goals of qualitative research.
The study further revealed that none of the five state universities and colleges involved has a position or item devoted to cybersecurity and information security, instead IT faculty who are teaching information and communication technology courses and programmer with other secondary responsibilities such as internal information system users, designated end-user member of the bids and awards committee, network and server administrator.
The results of this case study also indicate that there were incidents unique to selected state universities and colleges because of their individual mandate; their vision, mission, and objectives are not necessarily consistent with the literature.
The results and findings of this study point a consented effort of the current cybersecurity situation as described by IT informant with the followin! thematic categories: cybersecurity, readiness, threats, challenges, frequency incidence, channels, infection and critical-Author's Abstract