Scare and prepare: increasing awareness, safety, and passion for cyber-security (abstract only)

Radford University's Scare and Prepare (SP) program is being developed to enable high-school teachers to cultivate security cons cious cyber-citizens and, in the process, spark a passion for computer science. We are accomplishing this in two ways: (a) incentivize high school teachers to incorporate security into their curriculum with little investment in resources (hardware, software and personnel), and (b) introduce computer science concepts such as programming (e.g., Javascript) and basic operating system functionality (e.g., file organization and memory management). Our experience shows that success of high school CS programs depends on the teacher's motivation. SP will reduce preparation times for teachers by providing all the necessary learning materials in the form of screencast lectures and portable and remote hands-on labs. Ultimately, we propose to develop a dual enrollment college credit course. SP's learning materials are intended to spark interest among students by both scaring and preparing them. The first strategy is to scare students with the potential implications of cyber-attacks on aspects that matter to them: social networking sites and smart phones. Next, students are prepared to defend against such attacks. Finally, to sustain interest prepared high schools students will compete in cyber-defense exercises.