Gamification for Improving Cybersecurity

This thesis explores gamification and its application to cybersecurity. It is well known that nowadays the weak link in cybersecurity are humans. Both for personal and work reasons, people are constantly connected to each other throw devices, often without a real awareness of cybersecurity risks. At the same time, the lack of professional figures in the cybersecurity market with precise skills increases the need to train new experts in the field. For these reasons, concentrating the attention on the end users, with the purpose to create a usefulness education and awareness is important. Gamification uses, in a not game environment, game components and mechanics that involve and engage human attention encouraging a change of behaviour. Gamification is presented as a possible solution to counterbalance the limits of the standard training and awareness programs and general education in cybersecurity. The aim of the work was to create a useful methodology to support the development of future gamification experiences in the cybersecurity context thanks to scientific analysis. I analyzed the solution proposed starting from the review of the literature, search for new sources of information, identification of problems, synthesis of an original methodology and analysis of the present situation. To do so the work starts to analyze literature and the state of the art with frameworks, theories and previous works in private, educational and work environments. The methodology also collects different points of view from gamification experts, cybersecurity experts, end-users opinions and Professor experiences with active learning. The methodology gives hints, suggestions and elements to avoid in order to create experiences both in a technical environment and for training and awareness purposes. The methodology developed is used to propose a possible future application in the University context critically analysing strang, limits, problems and possible solutions. Moreover, it is used to analyse an already existing application of gamification in a private environment on the platform TryHackMe.