An integrated cybernetic awareness strategy to assess cybersecurity attitudes and behaviours in school context

• Autor(a) principal: Antunes, Mário
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Silva, Carina, Marques, Frederico
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/14067
• topic: Cybersecurity; Cyber awareness; Human factor; Attitudes and behaviours; School context

Digital exposure to the Internet among the younger generations, notwithstanding their digital abilities, has increased and raised the alarm regarding the need to intensify the education on cybersecurity in schools. Understanding the human factor and its influence on children, namely their attitudes and behaviors online, is pivotal to reinforce their awareness towards cyberattacks and to promote their digital citizenship. This paper aims to present an integrated cybersecurity and cyber awareness strategy composed of three major steps: (1) Cybersecurity attitude and behavior assessment, (2) self-diagnosis, and (3) teaching/learning activities. The following contributions are made: Two questionnaires to assess risky attitudes and behaviors regarding cybersecurity; a self-diagnosis to measure students’ skills on cybersecurity; a lesson plan addressing cyber awareness to be applied on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and citizenship education curricular units. Cybersecurity risky attitudes and behaviors were evaluated in a junior high school population of 164 students attending the sixth and ninth grades. The assessment focused on two main subjects: To identify the attitudes and behaviors that raise the risk of cybersecurity among the participating students; to characterize the acquired students’ cybersecurity and cyber awareness skills. Global and individual scores and the histograms for attitudes and behaviors are presented. The items in which we have observed significant differences between sixth and ninth grades are depicted and quantified by their corresponding p-values obtained through the Mann–Whitney non-parametric test. Regarding the results obtained on the assessment of attitudes and behaviors, although positive, we observed that the attitudes and behaviors in ninth-grade students are globally inferior compared to those attained by sixth-grade students. The deployed strategy for cyber awareness was applied in a school context; however, the same approach is suitable to be applied in other types of organizations, namely enterprises, healthcare institutions, and the public sector.