Lizards in the Street! Introducing Cybersecurity Awareness in a Digital Literacy Context

Learning cybersecurity awareness builds on basic information technology concepts and digital literacy skills. This paper describes a series of three different interactive sessions introducing cybersecurity awareness through presentation of actual breaches and incidents, demonstrations of open source intelligence tools (OSINT), and a capture the flag style competition where students applied their knowledge of OSINT to solve cybersecurity puzzles. The extra-curricular sessions were open to students enrolled in any undergraduate information technology course. This qualitative research study evaluates comments in blog posts and interviews after these sessions and concludes that cybersecurity awareness is relevant in students' daily lives and that they have a general sense of surprise, amazement and concern at how much personal information is readily available online