I am super excited to introduce the capstone project I’ve been working on for the last few weeks for my graduate program. Two other students and I are building a website to help educate teenagers on cyber-security. The following paragraphs give some context to our project and explain the solution we are in the process of developing. I’ll post updates as the project progresses.
Cyber-Security: A Growing Problem
What do Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, Adobe, LivingSocial and Evernote have in common? They all had between 250,000 and 50 million accounts compromised in 2013. According to the Online Trust Alliance, an estimated 740 million records were exposed in 2013, including credit card numbers, email addresses, log in credentials, social security numbers, and other personal information. 89% of these breaches could have been prevented. Many of these breaches involved teenagers with accounts on these sites. Over 95% of American teens use the Internet. 37% of all teens have smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011. 55% of teens say they give little or no thought to the consequences of posting something online. 49% of parents think their teens know how to deal with uncomfortable online, content, but fewer than 1/3 of teens agree. With about 25 million teenagers living in the United States, that ends up being more than 8 million teens. With the ever-growing presence of teenagers online, we are becoming increasingly concerned with keeping teens safe as they use the Internet daily. Many users fall prey to computer attacks that could easily be avoided through safe computer and Internet practices, but they haven’t been properly educated on how to protect their identity online.
Several cyber-security informational sites exist, but they don’t teach the average person how to be safe. Other cyber-security awareness sites exist for the average person, but they don’t tend to educate beyond overly simplified awareness of risks. Additionally, content varies across sites, but there is no comprehensive site that aggregates content from existing sites.
CyberIQ.org: An educational tool for teens
Our goal is to bridge the gap between security awareness and security education so that teens, parents, and educators can know how to actually do something about the threats that currently exist, protecting themselves and their families from online threats. For our capstone project in the BYU Master of Information Systems Management we are creating www.cyberiq.org that will do just this. CyberIQ’s vision is to enable teens everywhere to establish safe, lifelong online habits.
The website will provide a one-stop shop for people to understand what content already exists on other sites (security awareness) and provide a practical resource for them to know how to protect themselves (security education). We hope to call teens to action so that they will actually go out and do something about protecting themselves by visiting our site and using training materials we put on the site.
We also hope to ensure that our site can be created in a sustainable manner such that it can have an impact long after this semester ends. For this reason we are partnering with the Information Systems Department at BYU. Last night we held a service event with about 50 students for 2 hours to help build content for the website. For the next few weeks content will continued to be developed and be organized and published to the website. Training materials will also be developed to be used by parents and educators.
Students helping create content for the site
In early April we will be holding a training workshop with representatives from Provo, Nebo, Grand and Iron School Districts to train them on how to use the materials on our site and implement a cyber-security education program in their school district.
After April, we will continue to develop the site and improve materials, working with future students in the Information Systems department to continue to provide this service to the community .
To measure impact, we are coming up with a pre- and post-training assessment to be distributed at schools. Additionally, a similar assessment will be available on the website to allow other users to see how their knowledge improves as they utilize trainings on the site.
We are confident that CyberIQ has great potential. Clearly, cyber-security education is lacking as data breaches continue to abound worldwide. We believe that educating this generation of teenagers will create an empowered, educated group of young adults that will change the world in coming years.
Julie Walton 