Cyber-Detective: a game for cyber crime prevention

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Inês G. F.
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Morenets, Yuliya, Inácio, Pedro R. M., Silva, Frutuoso
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7476
• topic: Game - Cyber security educational

Technologies are increasingly becoming a part of the daily lives of younger generations and with no supervised usage of these technologies, teenagers are exposed to various threats. To raise the awareness of teenagers in ages between 14 and 17 years old, and to provide a methodological tool for educational professionals working with the young and even for enforcement professionals investigating the cyber cases, an educational game about cyber security was designed and prototyped. A detective game was devised, where the player takes the role of a detective to investigate a cyber crime. To solve the case, the player must play several mini-games, where each one explores a specific thematic about cyber security. For example, in the prototype, the situation that the detective needs to solve is a ransomware case. The situations are introduced by a tridimensional animation, which appears as a cutscene introducing the game scene. It is an animation where one can see a teen trying to buy a pair of sneakers online and after downloading an application suggested in the website, his mobile phone is locked. Thus, he decides to search help from the police, where the detective will try to solve the problem. For that, the player has to solve several mini-games about sharing information in social networks, phishing and the importance of creating strong passwords. In these mini-games the player makes decisions and learns based on that, i.e., at the end of each mini-game each decision is explained to the player regardless of the choice being correct or incorrect. This way, the player is always informed of the various situations that can occur based on their behavior/decisions online. The prototype was developed for mobile devices and some preliminary tests were performed with teenagers. The tests showed that the teenagers improved their cyber security knowledge after playing the game. A cyber security educational game can be used as a tool for younger generations because it uses the technologies that are part of their daily lives and can contribute to the growing of their cyber security awareness. In the future, we hope to develop the full game, where other thematic will be included, namely, talking with strangers in social networks, dangers related with the webcam and microphone, online piracy and cyber bullying.