Security and Privacy Risks Awareness for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Paradigm

The growing trend of BYOD in the higher education institutions creates a new form of student learning pedagogy in which students are able to use the mobile devices for their academic purposes in anywhere and anytime. Security threat in the paradigm of BYOD creates a great opportunity for hackers or attackers to find new attacks or vulnerabilities that could possibly exploit the students’ mobile devices and gains valuable data from them. A survey was conducted in learning the current awareness of security and privacy importance in BYOD for higher education in Malaysia. Based on the analysis of this survey, it demonstrates that the trend of BYOD in Malaysia has begun. Thoroughly, the survey results have been proven that the current basic fundamental security and privacy awareness and knowledge on mobile devices or applications is important in order to protect their mobile devices or data. Keywords—Mobile Computing; BYOD Higher Education; Security; Privacy; Malicious Software; Risk