Level of the information security awareness of the mechanical engineering students

Abstract

Aim of this research to analysing the level of the information security awareness of the undergraduate mechanical engineering students after the second semester. The access of the internet is easier day by day. My personal experience shows the young generation use smartphones, tablets to keep in contact with friends at home, on public transport, in the school etc. except sleeping. They use different communication forms like community sides, chat rooms and so on. These applications are protected by password authentication system to keep save the data of the users. I was interested for which systems find the mechanical engineering students important in everyday life and what kind of password use for protecting the information. Why is it important? We see almost in every month in the news a service provider was attacked again by hackers and the have put the username and the passwords on the Internet. The success of the attack depends on user error mainly. The companies store sometimes the important data without any protection. On the other hand the users share sensitive information on the community sites (“I am going to a party today evening”, “I am on holiday by the see” it means my home is empty tonight if I leave alone). I find the information security is a very important question today when we use lot of systems and we store the important information on devices, in cloud and so on. We have to know how can protect our information so I thought the basics of the information security in subject Informatics I. for the mechanical engineering students in the first semester because they do not have any subject which would include information about this topic. The students filled out an information security awareness questionnaire after the second semester. The multidimensional analysis shows which communication systems are more important to the students. These communications systems are protected by password authentication it means the next step of the analysis how long and how complicated password are used by students after the basic information security course in the first semester. The students had to say, how long password they are using by the most important systems like e-mail, community sites, and so on. The longer password is safer then shorter as we know. The following important question is how complicated is the used password. Is it include just lowercase letters, or include some uppercase letters too? Is it include maybe numbers or special characters like “;” or “,”? We need to know some more information about the used passwords. How often change the students these passwords? Are they using same passwords by different systems or one same password? In that case if they use same password it is more important to be the password complicated in other case if it is hacked, the attackers can log on in other systems too what the students use. After the analysis I could see how effective was the basic information security course for the mechanical engineering students. How could I build the information security awareness by them? Was it enough, or should I waste more time on this topic to help them to keep save the sensitive data?