The growth in cyberattacks across the globe has led to an increase in the demand for cybersecunty specialists,particularly in the area of incident response. As well as the shortage of specialists, the fast moving pace of technology means that those already working in the area also need to upgrade their skillset on a frequent
basis.
This project aimed to address these needs through the development of an up to date Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) curricula that would be made freely availabie to academia and industry.
The project has delivered a systematic analysis of the skills required in the field of digital forensics as well as the teaching material needed at nurturing such skills at different levels of professional development. In the course of curriculum development, the consortium has collected theoretical material on the core topics of digital forensics and expanded it with accompanying practical exercises. These matenals were tested during the admimstration of real courses at two partner universities. The educational quality of these materials was assessed by means of course evaluations. The case studies for the development of hands-on skills were designed using AWS as a virtualization platform. Such development entailed the definition of an exemplary architecture of a target system and implementation of benign applications, attacks and monitormg activities. To automate bootstrapping of the virtual machmes for an arbitrary number of students, generation of the lab infrastructure was scripted. Such scripts can be re-used by instructors administering such case studies.
The educational quality of the developed case study labs was assessed by offering them at public workshops held at established conferences in the field of information security and digital forensics. All the teaching materials are publicly available at the teaching platform setup by one of the project partners.
