Keeping Ireland safe from cybersecurity threats could be a course away

Vincent Ryan

Lecturer in charge of MSc in Cybersecurity, Munster Technological University

Triona McSweeney

Lecturer in charge of MSc in Cybersecurity Management, Munster Technological University

Cybersecurity is an excellent career path to follow. The number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide was reported to be 3.5 million in 2021, and that number is constantly growing.

Cork city has emerged as an important European cybersecurity hub for a few reasons, but being home to some of Ireland’s leading universities — including Munster Technological University (MTU) and University College Cork (UCC) — is certainly a contributing factor.

Local and international contribution

Our graduates and courses at MTU have consistently delivered on the industry skills needs strengthening the attractiveness of Cork city as a first location for Industrial Development Agency (IDA) and Enterprise Ireland (EI) client companies. The region hosts many organisations that focus on cybersecurity or indeed manufacture and retail cybersecurity products.

Many security operations centres are located in the region, and there are several community meetups, most notably CorkSec (a.k.a Defcon Group DC021353) which meets monthly in Cork city since 2013. Our cybersecurity activity extends into research including PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and faculty conducting work on a wide range of national and international projects — in most cases in collaboration with our industry partners.

We continue to expand and develop our cybersecurity offerings and have a strong track record of producing outputs with national and regional benefits in this area, including CyberIreland and CyberSkills, both of which are located mainly in MTU, are government-supported and have a national focus on the cybersecurity industry in Ireland.

We continue to expand and develop
our cybersecurity offerings.

Undergraduate and postgraduate cybersecurity courses

Cybersecurity forms a large part of the curriculum of all our course offerings in Computer Science. At the undergraduate level, every first year takes a cybersecurity module, and all of our undergraduate courses feature many cybersecurity modules.

At the postgraduate level, we offer a MSc and Postgraduate Diploma in Cybersecurity as well as a MSc and Postgraduate Diploma in Cybersecurity Management. The MSc in Cybersecurity focuses on the technical aspects of cybersecurity while the MSc in Cybersecurity Management is focused on the Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) aspects of cybersecurity. Neither course has any written exams, as the students learn by carrying out tasks and projects, and employment prospects in the cybersecurity industry from both courses are excellent.