Bournemouth University (BU) is an innovative, international university offering high quality student experience, research and professional practice. The University consists of six distinctive Schools and over 17,000 students with a significant proportion of international students from around 120 countries. Among our particular strengths, Bournemouth has the highest graduate employability rates in the UK. 90.1 (2009/10), and in 2011, we were awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for world-leading excellence and pioneering development in computer animation. Overall Bournemouth's research offering is amongst the best in the country. In the last research assessment, eight out of 10 areas assessed featured research that was adjudged to be ‘world leading’ and BU was the fourth most improved university in the UK for the quality of its research (with the Computing academic group having seen a dramatic rise of between 17 and 21 places, depending on which tables one consults).
BU Computer Emergency Response Team (BU-CERT) is the product of fusion of Bournemouth University’s IT Services, the Department of Computing and Informatics and the Department of Psychology. BU-CERT primarily offers threat intelligence to its constituency. Its analyst team triages, evaluates and prioritises threat information and feeds and communicates their findings to BU employees and students though security announcements and publication of security advisories. The following services are offered:
- lerts and Warnings.
- Incident Handling.
- Development of Security Tools.
- Configuration and Maintenance of Security Tools, Applications and Infrastructures.
- Awareness Building.
- Education and Training.
BU IT Services are responsible for the operational aspects of BU-CERT offering incident and vulnerability handling, assessments and alerts and warning services.
To complement and support IT Services, the Department of Computing conducts a number of research activities in the area of incident response, malware analysis and threat intelligence. The interdisciplinary research draws upon the competency and expertise of the Department’s research groups, encompassing data science, HCI, social informatics and security awareness and education. The Department of Psychology conducts research in a range of relevant topics, including risk perception, trust, social engineering and behaviour change. This includes work on understanding the motivations, group dynamics, social identity and decision making in hacker groups. This work aims to promote understanding on how threats may be prevented and mitigated; how people may be best educated and empowered to minimise the harm associated with cyber attacks.