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SDU trains Kazakhstan's cyber defenders as cybercrime losses rise 29-fold in a year

The world is short of 4.76 million cybersecurity professionals, and Kazakhstan's reported cybercrime losses rose 29-fold in a year. SDU University in Almaty Region built the first university course with Cloudflare to train defenders on the systems attackers target, and offers educational courses to relevant fields in the industry.

The main building of SDU University in Kaskelen, Almaty Region, Kazakhstan, with the Tian Shan mountains behind. Credit: SDU University.

The world is short of 4.76 million cyber defenders

The global cybersecurity workforce needed 4.76 million more people in 2024 to protect the organisations that employ it, and the shortfall grew 19% in a year, ISC2's 2024 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found. The International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency for digital networks, found the same shortage from the other side in its Global Cybersecurity Index 2024: a gap in skills, staffing, equipment, and funding across every region it assessed, in countries that have moved services online faster than they have trained the people to defend them.

Kazakhstan's cybercrime losses rise 29-fold as services move online

Reported cybercrime losses in Kazakhstan reached $34 million (16.4 billion tenge) in the first ten months of 2025, 29 times the figure a year earlier; 58% of the attacks used social engineering rather than a technical exploit; police solved one case in five, cybersecurity analyst Abylai Isin said in April 2026. Banks accounted for 6% of reported cases, and Almaty recorded more cases than anywhere else in the country.

The exposure is growing by design. The government has declared 2026 the Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, with a plan to move state IT systems onto a national digital platform, train the workforce in AI, and expand digital payments alongside a digital tenge and a regulated crypto-asset market. The plan names cybersecurity and personal data protection as priorities. "Protecting financial systems, cloud infrastructure and public digital platforms will require professionals who can work with the same technologies used by global companies and critical infrastructure providers," said Dr Arman Zhumazhanov, Rector of SDU University.

SDU builds its cyber course on the systems attackers target

SDU University, a private university in Kaskelen outside Almaty, answered with a course built by a company whose systems defend a large share of the world's websites. "Together with Cloudflare, we launched the world's first university Cloudflare course and established the company's first academic academy, giving students hands-on experience with Zero Trust architecture, DDoS protection and modern cloud security technologies," Zhumazhanov said. Zero Trust is a design in which no user or device is trusted by default, even inside the network, and every request is checked; DDoS protection absorbs floods of traffic sent to knock a service offline.

Students who complete the course move into SDU's SOC Simulation Challenge, a training floor built to resemble a corporate security operations centre, where they detect, investigate, and contain simulated attacks as they unfold. "Unlike traditional Capture the Flag competitions, this format develops practical Blue Team skills in threat detection, investigation and incident response," Zhumazhanov said. Blue Team is the defending side of a security exercise. The scenarios use the tactics behind Kazakhstan's own losses, social engineering first.

SDU was the first university in Kazakhstan to build its cybersecurity teaching around programmes set by technology vendors, Zhumazhanov said, and it now teaches on systems from Cloudflare, Cisco, AWS, Palo Alto Networks, and Fortinet among others. Students sit the vendors' own certification exams at a Pearson VUE test centre on campus, so they graduate holding the credentials employers screen for.

Dr Arman Zhumazhanov, Rector of SDU University. Credit: SDU University.

SDU puts research and industry partners at the centre of its strategy

The trained defenders have a direct route into the sector that carries the most reported attacks. SDU runs a FinTech Laboratory with Halyk Bank, Kazakhstan's largest bank, where faculty and students work on the bank's digitalisation, automation, and crypto-asset systems, after the bank approached the university directly, Zhumazhanov said.

Zhumazhanov became Rector in August 2026 and is writing a strategy that puts research and innovation, with the cybersecurity pipeline inside it, at the centre of the university. Every trained defender who goes into a bank or a government platform narrows the gap the UN index and ISC2 both measure. "Cybersecurity will become equally critical as digital services continue to expand," Zhumazhanov said.

SDU is negotiating a strategic partnership with Birkbeck, University of London, and aims to bring it to Astana in November 2026, when the Ministry of Science and Higher Education convenes Kazakhstan's foreign university partners for its annual strategic partners meeting. "We are open," Zhumazhanov said, naming AI, cybersecurity, climate change, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the fields where he wants UK and European university partners next.

Institutions in this article: SDU University, Cloudflare, Halyk Bank, Birkbeck, University of London.