Investigating Security Awareness among Secondary School Students

Children face many challenges with respect to the usage of ICT. There are difficulties
to seek for suitable security awareness training tools for secondary school students.
The age of the targeted group of this research concerned 13-1 8 years students, as they
exposed with different Internet usages and vulnerable to security risks, as the result, it
is very important for us to safeguard them to enable good and quality of life. This
research aims to identify potential tools that can be used by children to educate them
related to the security risks. Then, the research assesses the students' awareness level
related to social networks, passwords, and cyber bullying. In order to obtain these
objectives, a survey was conducted to assess children awareness level as well as
measuring the effectiveness of training tool. Specifically, the process of identifying
security awareness training tools was based on the wide search on security cyber
portal of South East Asia. To assess security practices related to social network,
passwords and cyber-bullying, Libyan secondary school students in Malaysia were
chosen as the target participants due to the fact that they are the future generation and
more exposed to danger according to literatures. The process of data collection done
with 50 Libyan secondary school students participated, and it can be reported that
even they have shown a slight level of awareness; however they still did not practice
information security correctly. With respect to the training tools, it shows that
majority of participants' preferred game type of tools. Future work must consider a
wider range of security risks that students may encounter.