Community Service: Cyber Safety Awareness

Introduction:

Today, the Internet has become a major part of our lives. It is a place where people no longer have to 'go places' to get things done, since it is now so accessible that places come to you. Many use the Internet to shop, bank, communicate, promote and share their life stories. However, to what extent can the Internet be trusted? Although users of the Internet must have acquired technical skills in order to take part, it seems that many are unaware of the potential disasters that may occur to one's personal information or 'online entity'.

Presentation:

For my community service, I have decided to spread awareness on cyber safety in several organizations with technically skilled staff. Doing so, I will not be testing the cyber-awareness of an average user, but a technical professional that may not have necessarily studied the history or scams behind the Internet. I will be using the response of my audience to test the level of awareness, with the assumption that the average Internet user is far less knowledgeable than researchers, editors, technical operation coordinators and graphics artists.

Organizations:

Rock Wallaby Productions

Al-Rayyan Television

Burning Fish Productions

Audience (internet usage):

- 2 Editors from National Geographic (7+ hours a day)

- 1 CGI Artist from Burning Fish Productions. (5+ hours a day)

- 3 Researchers (10+ hours a day)

- 2 Technical Operations Co-ordinators (13+ hours a day)

- 1 Online Editor

Results:

To my surprise, the response of the audience was opposed to what I had expected. Rather than many of these skilled, tech enthusiastic members of the audience prove to already know the content of my presentation; only one member claimed he had previous knowledge of this context of Cyber Safety. Mr. Nicolas Divischek stated "I had only known about this because I attended a seminar discussing these dangers, it surprises me that my colleagues have heard of this for the first time".

On a scale of one to ten, with 10 being full awareness prior to my presentation, are the following yielded results:

Conclusion:

It is unfortunate, that at such a late stage of advancement, many Internet users are not aware of what is going on 'behind the scenes'. I am glad to have opened the eyes of my audience during this community service. However, much