Abstract:

Social engineering attacks continue to pose a great threat to society, impacting every aspect of citizens’ lives. Even though the efforts of the cybersecurity community to increase awareness, cyber criminals continue to trick citizens to reveal sensitive information or take actions that could allow cyber criminals to launch other types of attacks. It is imperative to upskill citizens to become cyber resilient and be able to anticipate, prevent, detect, respond, and/or recover from a social engineering attack. This can be achieved by developing a culture of cyber situational awareness, which will empower citizens to realize when they are under attack, understand the attack means and what are the bad practices they should avoid, and what actions they need to take to address effectively social engineering attacks. One direction to consider developing a culture of cyber situational awareness is to design activities that provide an engaging and effective learning experience, assisting learners to process information, relate to the situation, retain information, and then apply their knowledge in real-life situations. To achieve such a learning experience, instructional design principles should be considered in combination with a microtargeting approach, to guide the design of the relevant learning activities. The objective of this work is to demonstrate that by considering Merrill’s Principles of Instruction (MPI), alongside a microtargeting approach to deliver focused messages to target audiences, we can design effective and engaging learning activities to increase societal resilience against social engineering attacks. The current work presents the design of a learning activity in a healthcare context.

Keywords:

Cybersecurity, Social Engineering Attacks, Instructional Design, Cybersecurity Education, Cyber Situational Awareness, Societal Resilience.