The Map of Higher Education puts obstacles for the new specialities, says the Rector of the UNWE Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov in an interview for the 24 Hours newspaper.
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Prof. Dimitrov, in just a few years the word "cybersecurity" has become the mantra of modern business, is your university ready to meet these expectations?
Our university reacted quite timely and quite adequately. A few years ago we started the preparation for the speciality Cybersecurity and e-Government and the related Master's degree programme in Cybersecurity Management. Unfortunately, the education is now quite heavily regulated and does not allow rapid implementation of new programmes. We have been struggling for 2 and a half years to get accreditation because we wait for the places in the other universities to be filled according to the notorious Map of Higher Education and then the Ministry of Education to allow us to get accreditation. But hackers don't need accreditation! This should be clear to all stakeholders. Having in mind that we are ready with the entire programme for the specialty, that the financial sector and all business companies look for such specialists trained in our university because it is a benchmark for the quality of education, we can`t train such specialists. This is nonsense.
After all, the University prepares cybersecurity specialists?
Yes, we have found some way to train Bachelor students even now - through a joint programme with the Thrace University. We have trained maybe 200 people in our Master's degree programme. It is registered at the European Cybersecurity Agency and we have international lecturers. Our lecturers and researchers also have vast experience, show remarkable capabilities, and the UNWE impelements cybersecurity audits of large companies, including those of the country's strategic infrastructure.
In addition to our educational efforts, we organize many additional activities for our students - hackathons and competitions held in collaboration with business organizations. We have signed over 20 contracts with leading companies in the field of information security and cybersecurity. We make a lot of efforts, but we want these efforts to be supported by the Ministry of Education and Science and the National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency, because, I repeat once again, hackers do not need accreditation and this creates big problems.
And has the University itself secured its cyberdefence?
We are a very digitalized university. The services we provide online are certainly over 30 - enrollment, application, payment, dormitories, grade checking, transcripts, digital student files, digital ledgers, virtual switchboard, new superfast network. However, all of this requires tremendous maintenance and adjustments that need to be done by specialists. We have also had cyber incidents related to information security. We cope with them. But it should be clear that the companies have enormous difficulty to finding staff, and we ourselves also have trouble to find staff for our IT Directorate.
Does the UNWE provide services in this sector?
We continue to develop in this direction. We are also going to work on programmes of the Ministry of Innovation and Growth to provide this service to SMEs. It is also key for us to develop this business part of our educational capacity.
At the same time, we have a Competence Centre funded by the European Commission under a project on big data in the field of economics. We work together with 6 other universities in Sofia on superfast computing and data processing. We await to get an approval for the second phase of this project on big data economies, where more than 15 million leva have already been invested.