Today's ever-evolving threat landscape requires a creative approach to thwart the adversary. At Secureworks®, we protect thousands of organizations with best in class, battle-tested cybersecurity solutions. Just as important as leveraging great technology is ensuring your team has basic cybersecurity literacy skills so they don't fall victim to common ploys like phishing attacks.
This is why Secureworks and DevPost recently partnered to offer the Secureworks Cybersecurity Literacy Challenge, which had over 350 registrants. The 8-week challenge inspired participants to use their imagination to build games that teach any information security topic in a fun and engaging way – with prizes up for grabs totaling $30,000 in value. Secureworks just announced the winners last week, and through a series of interviews, we plan to share some insights on the winners, their projects, and what they hope to achieve with the game they built to promote cybersecurity literacy.
The team behind the Cyber Security Escape Room won first place, for a grand prize of $10,000.
Our first interview is with brothers Thijs and Bas Bosschert, who drew on their combined experience in cybersecurity to create the winning game, Cyber Security Escape Room, which received the grand prize of $10,000. In this point-and-click game, players take on the role of a hacker as they try to get their hands on sensitive information. A judge noted the Cyber Security Escape Room game stood out for its ease of use, well thought-out graphics, and the way it accessibly presented cyber literacy concepts. As such, the Secureworks editorial team sat down with Thijs and Bas for insight into their winning project.
Q. What was your inspiration for this game?
Thijs and Bas Bosschert: "The inspiration for the game has been the many years of experience we have in the cybersecurity field, the need for more security awareness, and our own experience with boring and annoying mandatory security e-learnings. We wanted to make a more enjoyable and fun security awareness training for both home and corporate usage. One of our goals was to create a realistic experience which would teach real-life skills and have people experience the learning points."
Q. What is your background in game development and/or in cybersecurity?
Thijs and Bas Bosschert: "We have some experience with designing and building physical escape rooms for entertainment. However, the Cyber Security Escape Room is our first time building an online game experience. It is also the first time we combined the cybersecurity and escape room fields."
"We both have over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity field (we started in security/hacking in the late 90s). We both worked for multiple companies before starting as freelancers around 7 years ago. We are quite broad in knowledge and currently work as penetration testers, security officers, incident response managers, red-teamers and provide training and workshops. We have been very active in the CTF (Capture the Flag) hacking games field for many years, both playing as well as organizing."
Q. What aspect of cybersecurity do you hope your game will teach the public?
Thijs and Bas Bosschert: "We hope to raise the overall security awareness and do it in such a way that end users don't feel negatively about security measures. Some of the topics we cover include ransomware, secure password usage, backups, social media usage, physical security, and clean desk."
To learn more about the game, please visit: https://devpost.com/software/cyber-security-escape-room-menx73