Cyber Shield Security Awareness Program

Abstract

Information is a critical asset in any organization to achieve its strategic goals. For this, organizations enforce physical, logical, and administrative controls to protect their information from being corrupted, manipulated, or leaked. However, some organizations are unaware that some employees, with little awareness of cybersecurity threats, are an easy target for attackers. Nowadays, companies implement security awareness using policies, procedures, and training sessions, to list a few. Traditional information security training sessions have relied heavily on presentation slides and videos. This paper aims to improve the employees' security awareness by developing an interactive video game, Cyber Shield Game, which includes various embedded threat scenarios. The proposed game consists of two levels. The Password Complexity Level trains players about password threats. The Physical Security Level aware the employees about storage and disposal of confidential documents. Further, two surveys, pre and post-game, are conducted to estimate the players' knowledge and experience level in cybersecurity threats. The proposed security awareness program is applied to ten employees randomly chosen from different institutions. Experimental results indicate that a security awareness program is more interactive than traditional awareness methods. Results also indicate that the proposed program improves the employees' security awareness level by 51%.