Santiago Suppan

James Barela, Tiago Espinha Gasiba, Santiago Reinhard Suppan et al.

Many people are unaware of the digital dangers that lie around each cyber-corner. Teaching people how to recognize dangerous situations is crucial, especially for those who work on or with computers. We postulated that interactive graphic vignettes could be a great way to expose professionals to dangerous situations and demonstrate the effects of their choices in these situations. In that way, we aimed to inoculate employees against cybersecurity threats. We used the Comic-BEE platform to create interactive security awareness vignettes and evaluated for how employees of a major industrial company perceived them. For analysing the potential of these comics, we ran an evaluation study as part of a capture-the-flag (CTF) event, an interactive exercise for hacking vulnerable software. We evaluated whether the comics fulfilled our requirements based on the responses of the participants. We showed the comics, on various cybersecurity concepts, to 20 volunteers. In the context of a CTF event, our requirements were not fulfilled. Most participants considered the images distracting, stating a preference for text-only material.

Tiago Espinha Gasiba, Kristian Beckers, Santiago Suppan et al.

Teaching industry staff on cybersecurity issues is a fundamental activity that must be undertaken in order to guarantee the delivery of successful and robust products to market. Much research attention has been devoted to this topic over the last years. However, the research which has been done has not focused on developing secure code in industrial environments. In this paper we take a look at the constraints and requirements for delivering a training, by means of cybersecurity challenges, that covers secure coding topics from an industry perspective. Using requirements engineering, we aim at understanding the design requirements for such challenges. Along the way, we give details on our experience of delivering cybersecurity challenges in an industrial setting and show the outcome and lessons learned. The proposed requirements for cybersecurity challenges geared towards software developers in an industrial environment are based on systematic literature review, interviews with security experts from the industry and semi-structured evaluation of participant feedback.