Learning Security Awareness in Email Communication Using a Platform for Digital Skill Teaching

Despite emails having been a standard technology since the 1970s, they are still indispensable in daily communication and the number of sent emails continues to rise year by year. This technology is not limited to business, it is also used in education, entertainment, or personal correspondence. Emails are also present in the everyday life of children: they are required to join websites, social networks or to participate in school -especially in homeschooling. However, emails are also associated with disadvantages such as spam, phishing, or malware. To engage children in security awareness we developed the DigiSkill platform, which provides interactive educational experiences. It consists of modules such as email or browser simulations, to increase the student's digital skills. In this research, we evaluated the tool with 52 secondary school students to observe their knowledge on security awareness in the context of email usage and to help gain a better understanding. Therefore, we conducted an in-class evaluation with a tool intervention and related pre- and post-activities. We observed different characteristics in emails that students use for classification and identified common misconceptions. We found that students follow an intensely visual approach, which means the visual representation of an email has a strong impact on the level of suspicion students have. We aim to provide educators with a tool to improve the security awareness skills of their students and to discuss educational possibilities in this field with our research findings.