Persuading faculty and staff to care about security awareness at an educational institution is often challenging. Budgets are small, attention spans are short and responsibilities such as teaching take precedence. Being secure can be a low priority, and cybersecurity can even conflict with educational ideals like openly sharing research data. This is as true for small colleges as it is for large universities such as those in the Big Ten. When you think of Big Ten universities, you may picture them clashing on the football field, the basketball court or the soccer pitch. But Big Ten institutions can and do work together outside of sports arenas! In this presentation, participants will learn how different universities of the Big Ten (which now comprises eighteen institutions of higher education) came together to motivate employees at each institution. Representatives from each university cooperated and collaborated to plan a cybersecurity game show event that was the culmination of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. By harnessing the power of school spirit and friendly competition, faculty and staff from across the Big Ten learned about cybersecurity, increased their security awareness and had fun doing it. In this presentation, we’ll demonstrate how we were able to harness a natural competitive spirit to deliver security awareness in a fresh, new way via gamification, while delivering cost savings to our institutions through collaboration. Participants will come away from this presentation with ideas on how to incorporate competition into their own security awareness programs, as well as ways to reach and involve disengaged employees in security awareness.
