Abstract:

In spring 2020, Europe had to switch to fully online education due to the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic, in autumn 2020, education at some universities could start in hybrid form, with large lectures being held online and small exercises and lab sessions being held in person. In early November 2020, the second wave of the epidemic meant that education was fully online almost everywhere and remained online until summer 2021.

In online and hybrid education, not only teachers but also students were able to communicate with each other for quite a long time using web-based tools, and students could access course material, write papers and take exams only online. The web tools used could be accessed by entering a username and password after registration, but from an information security point of view it is interesting how easy it was to guess or decrypt the password. In this paper, we show whether the students' password habits reveal a change in their information security awareness compared to previous years, due to the fact that they had to spend several hours a day on web systems they had not used before. Of particular interest, we show differences in information security awareness between the different fields of study for pre-school teachers and students of applied computer science.

Keywords:

Information security awareness, online education.