Understanding Young People’s Experiences of Cybersecurity

Nicholson, James, Terry, Julia, Beckett, Helen and Kumar, Pardeep (2021) Understanding Young People’s Experiences of Cybersecurity. In: EuroUSEC '21: European Symposium on Usable Security 2021. ACM, New York, US, pp. 200-210. ISBN 9781450384230

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3481357.3481520

Abstract

Young people are increasingly becoming responsible for the security of their devices, yet do not appear to have the knowledge to protect themselves online. In this paper, we explore young people’s knowledge of cybersecurity through a series of workshops with secondary school children, and co-design cybersecurity lessons aimed at engaging this demographic. We find that technical demonstrations are an effective way of engaging young people’s curiosity in the subject, and that group activities aimed at exploring the subject are preferred methods. We also find that while knowledgeable about cybersecurity theory (e.g. passwords), their actual behaviours did not reflect best practice. We discuss the role of schools in cybersecurity education and how to best embed this content in the curriculum to maximise the engagement of students, including a focus on teaching about cybersecurity protective tools.

Item Type: Book Section
Additional Information: Funding information: Research funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M022722/1). The 2021 European Symposium on Usable Security, EuroUSEC 2021; Online; 11-12 OCT 2021
Uncontrolled Keywords: children, cybersecurity, digital citizenship curriculum
Subjects: G400 Computer Science
Department: Faculties > Engineering and Environment > Computer and Information Sciences
Depositing User: Rachel Branson
Date Deposited: 24 Aug 2021 11:17
Last Modified: 28 Jan 2022 12:00
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/46986

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