GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence agency for information assurance, will approve UK postgraduate courses in cyber security – effectively endorsing a Masters in spying, recent reports claim. This might come in useful for the agency’s own employees.
GCHQ, the UK government surveillance agency, is to give its stamp of approval to postgraduate courses in cyber security, essentially certified degrees for spies.
The 39-page document from GCHQ, seen by the Independent, says that the increasing number of courses in security related subjects at institutions across the UK means that it is becoming more and more difficult to “assess the quality of the degrees on offer.”
In order to gain certification a master’s degree must offer a “general, broad foundation in cyber security” and must also include a detailed knowledge of threats to online activity including “common attacks”, “malicious code” and “adversarial thinking.”
The new GCHQ certificates will be valid for five years before having to be renewed, and it is hoped the new system will create more clarity in what’s on offer.
The Cheltenham based surveillance agency has sent out a brief to all universities in the UK offering an MSc in cyber security to apply for certification before June 20.
Chris Ensor, the deputy director for the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, which acts as the information-security arm of GCHQ, said that while they had sent some employees into schools to encourage pupils to be interested in maths, they could do more to recruit the right people.
“We’re a highly technical organization with a highly technical workforce, so we depend on the young talent coming through all the way from schools to apprenticeships and degrees,” he said.
The GCHQ certificates are part of the UK government’s broader cyber-security strategy, which aims “for the UK in 2015 to derive huge economic and social value from a vibrant, resilient and secure cyberspace.”
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