With the growing amount of digitized information in the corporate environment, the risk of losing customer or business data, falling victim to fraudsters and blackmailers, or losing the company’s ability to act due to technical malfunctions is also increasing. It is the task of information security to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data. Looking at the greatest sources of insecurity in the company, individual employees quickly come into focus: through manipulation and disinformation, attackers are increasingly attempting to tap sensitive information from companies. But data security risks have also become an integral part of private life. Privately lived behaviors have a major influence on how carefully risks are recognized and assessed at work. Information security is therefore a foundation for digital sovereignty – the perception of risks, the exercise of rights and the proactive prevention of damage scenarios. Enabling sovereign actions in digital spaces is part of the project “SOCIAL – Sovereign Citizen Alliance”, which BF/M Bayreuth – together with the IT Security Cluster (Regensburg, Germany) and Mykolas Romeris University (Vilnius, Lithuania) – is conducting.
The goal of this project is to promote digital sovereignty of individuals in digital spaces.
Measures need to be communicated in order to gain sovereignty over individual information and thus strengthen the digital security of individuals and companies. On the one hand, the project develops strategies on how to enable empowerment with the aim of autonomous action strategies in digital spaces and, on the other hand, how small and medium-sized enterprises can also analyze and ensure protection needs with the help of information security management systems.
Education and training are the most important starting points for developing the skills required for digital sovereignty. Therefore, information exchange and knowledge transfer are the focus of this project.
In order to achieve the goal of the project, two specific activities will be carried out:
- A transnational exchange on practices in education and the current state of digital sovereignty in partner countries.
- The transfer of existing tools to support SMEs in particular in the development of information security skills.
For more information, please visit our project website.