How Can a Game Educate Players About Security Best Practices?

What if a computer simulation could teach a user about security best practices? This is the idea behind Orwell, a simulation that puts the player in the position of a surveillance agency employee who is on the hunt for the perpetrators of a terrorist attack.

Unlike a traditional game where players collect clues and piece together puzzles to move from location to location, your task is to move amongst the digital world, compiling a case against your suspect with data unscrupulously collected from blogs, news sites, and private communications that you upload at your discretion into the Orwell System.

However, you can make mistakes in the game, and omitting a critical piece of information or including a little extra data on a particular suspect can send your case down the wrong path. Thanks to the game’s titular Orwell System, once you do so, there is no turning back to undo the damage.

It is in this way that Orwell can teach everyone, and particularly business owners, about the importance of their data security practices.

Picture, for a moment, that a cybercriminal worms their way into your company’s network just as the player does in Orwell. Just as in the game, without sufficient security measures in place, your company and its critical documents are now at the full mercy of the intruder. However, rather than pursuing the warped justice of the in-game world, your hypothetical intruder’s motivations are decidedly more personal.

Consider the damage someone who managed to infiltrate your network could do to your business, and consider how many ways they could potentially do so. From stealing your sensitive data to introducing crippling malware into your systems, a cyber criminal with the access depicted in Orwell could have their way with your business, possibly causing irreparable damage before you even realize they are there.

Unfortunately, it’s not just fiction or a game--criminals are out there. Whether they are targeting your business specifically, or just blindly exploiting a common weakness found across hundreds or thousands of networks, small business security needs to be taken seriously.

Clearly, no business can afford events like these to occur. To avoid them, it is highly recommended (to the point that it is required) that every business deploy security solutions of the highest available caliber, and put initiatives into action within the office to educate employees on best practices specifically intended to foil cyber criminals. A brief sample of these best practices may include:

• Utilizing unique and complex passwords for each of their online accounts, and changing them regularly.
• Only opening email attachments from trusted sources, with confirmation that an attachment was to be sent.
• Utilize a permissions system to prevent employees from accessing data that they do not require to perform their job responsibilities, keeping the number of potential leak points to a minimum.

Suffolk Computer Consultants can assist you in deploying the solutions you will need to help implement these best practices. To set up a meeting with one of our experts, call 631-905-9617 today.