Lack of Cyber Awareness in Youth

The main problem we are trying to solve is understanding why and how most people succumb to hackers and seeing how we can lessen this by providing a way for people to learn cyber hygiene and security to protect themselves/their families.

A lack of knowledge of cyber hygiene can lead to users getting hacked in a variety of ways. The most common hacks we see today are aimed towards weak passwords that are being shared between multiple platforms, which may help users to remember passwords, but it may also be an easy way to lose access to all accounts and platforms using that identical password. 

All of us can relate to and be fearful of the cruel nature of our everyday lives, and the internet is no different. The internet is something we rarely go a day without using as well as the passwords to our devices which we use every day. The less we know about cyber hygiene the more we are at risk to fall victim to hacks, scams, and all other types of cruel attacks on our devices and accounts. 

Virtual Vigilante aims to partner with schools to help the learning process of better cybersecurity practices. We trust that schools will invest in this product for tighter safety and vigilance of their students. 

The Design-Thinking Process

While designing our product, we wanted to ensure that we cultivated creativity through our lessons. In order to keep our users engaged, we aim for teens to be able to engage and retain information learned from Virtual Vigilante. We wanted to create an app about cybersecurity that was different from everything else already on the market. Knowing why we wanted to create Virtual Vigilante ties very closely to empathy and a human-centered approach. Social media is used by the majority of teens in the United States, and witnessing or interviewing people who have social media without any knowledge of cyber hygiene related issues can be scary. We want Virtual Vigilante to be able to equip teens with proper cybersecurity knowledge so that they can avoid any harm from digital threats. 

Building Empathy

Virtual Vigilante was designed to be a new way to teach teenagers better cyber hygiene. Most cybersecurity apps or websites are not youth-friendly and are too bland to hold the attention of teenagers for long. With Virtual Vigilante, we prioritize empathetic and human-centered solutions that teenagers should be able to learn effectively from and hold an interest in. 

Our app is not only designed for use in schools, as it also has a place at home for personal use. Outside of school, we aim to get teens to feel excited or interested in learning more about cybersecurity through Virtual Vigilante. 

Younger people make up some of the largest percentage of Internet users in the world. It is not uncommon for them to suffer from different cyber-attacks such as phishing, hacking, or social engineering. They may also find themselves not completely aware of common cyber hygiene issues such as weak passwords or knowing what a scam email may look like. This is why we at Virtual Vigilante are here to educate the youth on cyber hygiene/cyber security steps.

Statistics and Research

In Ahmed's article from October 2022 regarding teenagers and adults being victims of scams, about 16% of young people were noted to have been scammed online in different ways. We also conducted our own survey that received sixteen responses. All the responses were from people between the ages of 18-27 and we found that about 81.3% of the respondents wished they were more aware of online risks and basic cyber practices when they were younger. By establishing this experience and applying the empathy process to Virtual Vigilante, we wanted to take into account people from a close age group and be able to apply it to our design thinking.