Between September last year and this August, employers in the United States posted 313,735 job openings for cyber security professionals. Filling those jobs would mean increasing the country's current cyber security work force of 715,000 people by more than 40 per cent, according to data presented at the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Conference this month.

With the number of unfilled cyber security jobs worldwide projected to multiply into the millions in the next three years, it's no surprise that governments, companies and schools are racing to pour more resources into cyber security training and education programmes.