Want to Raise Cybersecurity Awareness? Start with Future IT Professionals

TL;DR

This paper presents a new online cybersecurity awareness course designed for future IT professionals, demonstrating its positive impact on students' knowledge, perspectives, and practical application through empirical evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative, accessible cybersecurity course that explains the reasoning behind defensive measures and evaluates its effectiveness among university students.

Findings

Students valued the course highly.

Reported increases in cybersecurity knowledge and perspective.

Suggestions for course improvement were provided.

Abstract

As cyber threats endanger everyone, from regular users to computing professionals, spreading cybersecurity awareness becomes increasingly critical. Therefore, our university designed an innovative cybersecurity awareness course that is freely available online for students, employees, and the general public. The course offers simple, actionable steps that anyone can use to implement defensive countermeasures. Compared to other resources, the course not only suggests learners what to do, but explains why and how to do it. To measure the course impact, we administered it to 138 computer science undergraduates within a compulsory information security and cryptography course. They completed the course as a part of their homework and filled out a questionnaire after each lesson. Analysis of the questionnaire responses revealed that the students valued the course highly. They reported new learning, perspective changes, and transfer to practice. Moreover, they suggested suitable improvements to the course. Based on the results, we have distilled specific insights to help security educators design similar courses. Lessons learned from this study are relevant for cybersecurity instructors, course designers, and educational managers.