Abstract:
Users often struggle to stay digitally secure. Despite a multitude of security advice, they find it challenging to identify threats and develop appropriate behaviors to prevent potential attacks, especially in complex domains such as software updating. Our work seeks to improve the efficacy of security advice by exploring a new approach: video entertainment education (e.g. edutainment). Prior work has shown that negative experiences can be powerful teachers and has suggested that security stories users see on TV may actually teach them new behaviors. Building on this foundation, we conducted a participatory design study (n=13) to develop a video that entertains users into updating their software. This edutainment video was professionally produced and compared to text-based security advice in a controlled experiment (n=151). Based on this experiment, we find preliminary evidence that our security edutainment video increases users’ likelihood of updating their software more than traditional textbased security advice. This suggests that edutainment holds promise for digital security education and that edutainment videos may eventually become viable replacements for corporate security videos and some text-based security advice.
