Exploring Critical Challenges and Factors Influencing E-Learning Systems Security During COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic swiftly forced the closure of higher education institutions across the world. As a result, all educational institutions have made a considerable move toward e-learning. E-learning systems suffer from confidentiality, integrity, and availability-related security threats. Hence, understanding this problem from various perspectives that include technology, human behavior, management, and policies, as well as implementing policies and standards will assist in finding the most influencing factors that can help in protecting e-learning information systems from potential security threats. In this research, a review has been conducted to analyze and assess 55 states of the art articles on e-learning security and to identify countermeasures to strengthen e-learning information systems. The study contributes to our understanding of how to strengthen the e-learning information systems security by answering the following questions: What are the factors that have an impact on the e-learning systems vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the most important technology, management, and environment-based factors that need to be considered for protecting e-learning systems from potential security attacks?. The results of this study will enable decision and policymakers at higher education institutions to better understand the essential elements of adopting an e-learning system. Knowing these factors will help the designers and developers of e-learning systems adopt secure software design and development methodologies to reduce the likelihood that such vulnerabilities and it contributes to enhancing the system's security resilience against potential attacks. In addition, university management will be more knowledgeable about how to instruct their staff and students on best practices for using e-learning web applications.