IIT Madras Digital Skills Academy launches a cybersecurity course

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Team Careers360 | April 2, 2020 | 03:14 PM IST

NEW DELHI: The Digital Skills Academy of Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has launched a cybersecurity course for law enforcement and network security professionals in the private and public sectors. It is open to the general public as well and will be on protecting sensitive information.

The 120-hour course on cybersecurity is named ‘Certified Cyber Warrior’. The ‘live’ online classes will be conducted on the weekends. The course includes practical sessions with over 52 learning tools and a 30-hour intensive boot-camp at the IIT Madras campus.

The cybersecurity course is being offered to government, police/security professionals, public sector units, or PSUs, IT service managers and network administrators.

Critical sectors

The course seeks to “help the critical sectors and the industry to secure themselves from data breaches, accidental sending of sensitive information and use of private emails for official communications”, said a statement issued by IIT Madras.

“There has been a worrying increase in IT threats across both public and private sector institutions,” said Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras.

He says that cyber-attacks in sectors like transport, power and energy, telecom, governance, banking and financial services, would not only carry a heavy financial cost but also impact human lives. Thus, there is an urgent need for qualified personnel to handle information security issues in each of these sectors.

The IIT Madras Digital Skills Academy has already partnered with the government and industry to impart education in cybersecurity. It is collaborating with Forensic Intelligence Surveillance and Security Technologies (FISST), Chennai, to launch various training series on different aspects of cybersecurity, covering all segments of cyber-users.

V. Kamakoti from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras, who is also a member of Government of India’s National Security Advisory Board, is the advisor for this programme.

The cybersecurity course is a certification course and learners who complete the program will receive formal certificates from the Centre for Continuing Education, IIT Madras.