Information Security: Awareness and Training Program in the Middle East Universities

An effective Security Awareness and Training (SAT) program enables organizational members to understand the organization’s security strategies, know their responsibilities, and control risks that are caused by security incidents. Therefore, deploying a SAT program is one of the most important steps for any organization to assure that information assets are appropriately secured. The aim of this paper is into folds: first, to gain an insight and determine the information security awareness and training program levels in Middle Eastern higher education sector through a case study that examined 182 institute websites over eight countries. Second, to provide recommendations based on the findings that aid information security professionals to establish a new or improved existing awareness and training program. Literature showed that no study has been done on the SAT program at the level of the Middle Eastern region. However, there was a need to this investigation and therefore, it was a pioneering study at the region level in the field of information security.