Abstract

Engaging and thorough cybersecurity awareness has been overlooked with the rapid evolution of the internet and technology. As companies faced threats from across the globe, their employees’ lack of proper cybersecurity awareness allowed these threats through the front door. Additionally, most of the cybersecurity awareness exercises created did not engage learners. Social Cipher was a gamified educational exercise for raising cybersecurity awareness and was marketed to a wide audience, including students, rising IT professionals, and general learners. By structuring the game as an escape room, each level presented players with a unique and complex cybersecurity challenge that mirrored real-world threats, fostering interactive learning through critical and logical problem-solving tasks. Players navigated through various escape rooms centered on important cybersecurity topics such as email security, access management, and ethical hacking. For example, players sifted through a terminal to identify attacker warning signs, like forged sender details, in the first level.