From Play to Profession: A Serious Game to Raise Awareness on Digital Forensics

From Play to Profession: A Serious Game to Raise Awareness on Digital Forensics

연구 분야: Safety

학회: IFIP Annual Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy

With the increasing digitization and interconnectivity of organizations, the frequency of cyberattacks is rising. These attacks have serious consequences for data security and critical infrastructure. However, the persistent lack of cybersecurity specialists represents a major challenge for organizations. One approach to address this issue is to use serious games for career orientation in schools to steer people interested in security or digital forensics (DF) at an early age. Thus, we introduce a serious game called Digital Detectives, designed to familiarize students and young IT professionals with DF practices. Players adopt the role of forensic investigators tasked with probing a cyberattack on a company and acquire hands-on expertise by gathering evidence, identifying perpetrators, and recovering encrypted data. We evaluated the serious game with 102 young students in a pre- and post-test. We find that our serious game has a great game experience and significantly increases learning outcomes and awareness of DF. Our results indicate that the games’ learning outcomes and game experience are strongly correlated to increased awareness of DF. In sum, the serious game is an effective means to aid students in career orientation and raise awareness of DF.