The Design and Evaluation of an Interactive Social Engineering Training Programme

Social engineering is a major issue affecting organisational security. Educating employees on how to avoid social engineering attacks is important because social engineering tries to penetrate an organisation by using employees to grant authorized access to sensitive information. While there are a number of theoretical studies about social engineering, a few practical studies have moved towards educating and training employees on how to spot such attacks. In this research, we emphasise the importance of educating employees to make them more resilient to these kinds of attacks. We developed an educational video encapsulated within a Social Engineering Training Programme. This is essentially an interactive training video during which the learner interacts with three different scenarios; educational content, a knowledge-check, and a web page containing the latest news about current social engineering attacks. The training programme was evaluated in a Saudi trading company with 24 employees. The evaluation showed that the programme delivered a positive impact in terms of awareness, as tested by a post-training qui

SASICE: Safety and sustainability in civil engineering

The performance of the built environment and the construction sector are of major importance in Europe’s long term goals of sustainable development in a changing climate. At the same time, the quality of life of all European citizens needs to be improved and the safety of the built environment with respect to man-made and natural hazards, such as flooding and earthquakes, needs to be ensured. Education has a central role to play in the transformation of a construction sector required to meet increasing demands with regard to safety and sustainability. In this work, the SASICE project is presented. The aim of this project is to promote the integration of safety and sustainability in civil engineering education. The project is organised in the context of the Lifelong Learning Programme, funded by the European Community. The coordinator organisation is the University of Bologna. Nine partner universities from different countries are involved in this transnational project. The universities participating to the project constitute a network of high level competences in the civil engineering area, with several opportunities to improve lifelong learning adopting different media: joint curricula, teaching modules and professor and student exchanges. As a response to the challenge regarding new educational methods in sustainable engineering, teaching modules are developed in 4 thematic areas: (1) Safety in construction, (2) Risk induced by Natural Hazards Assessment, (3) Sustainability in construction, and (4) Sustainability at the territorial level. The development of the teaching modules is based on an extensive analysis of the need for highly qualified education on Safety and Sustainability involving all relevant stakeholders (European and national authorities, companies, research institutes, professional organizations, and universities).The main target is enabling students to introduce these advanced topics in their study plans and curricula and reach, at the end of their studies, a specific skill and expertise in safety and sustainability in Civil Engineering. With our natural resources fading away and our infrastructure in dire need of repair, new trends and challenges in civil engineering education in the concept of “Sustainable Development” are needed to be adressed.<br/