Teaching engineers cyber security skills is vital in order to protect the UK's critical national infrastructure, according to cyber expert at the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), Hugh Boyes.
The IET is trying to raise awareness of the need for cyber security skills among engineering and technology companies by running events and launching schemes with government and private sector partners.
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A recent IET survey of 250 SMEs found that only half were even aware of the government's Cyber Security Strategy, while only 14 per cent said cyber threats were a high priority.
Boyes explained that the research shows that SMEs in particular need to send their employees on courses to learn about the techniques they need to protect intellectual property and to safeguard devices.
"When you start thinking about the internet of things, [organisations] need to be designing products that are relatively robust and resilient. A critical issue we have around that is that if you implement a device and it contains an embedded web server that's poorly designed and configured, it just becomes another means of generating and propagating malware or spam," he told Computing.
"We need to raise the awareness to make devices less susceptible to attacks. It is better to do it now, than have problems out there in the wild and react to them later," he added.
Boyes believes that the government has fared well in its campaign to raise awareness in large corporations and within government departments, but said that this must now be spread towards smaller firms, many of which believe they are not at risk.
IET is behind the government's Trustworthy Software Initiative, which looks at collating and promoting the security behind the design and implementation of software.
Boyes believes that if software developers are taught the right technical skills to begin with, the cyber threat will diminish.
"If we teach people who are going to be developing software best practice as early as possible and point them to resources that tell them what the best practice is, that reduces the number of defects, bugs and security holes in the software and ultimately that makes [the UK's] systems more secure.
"That in itself is a big challenge because it is easier to teach someone basic programming skills. Many universities pride themselves on how quickly they can familiarise students with a range of new coding languages, but teaching good software engineering is quite an art," he said.
