Hello everyone in this talk I'm going to go over the CyberGuardians initiative where we trained
older members of the community to be knowledgeable about cybersecurity so they could then
help their peers protect themselves online. The main reason why we did this is because
we know that older adults are actively targeted by cybercriminals, yet older adults don't always
have the right sources of information. We know that they heavily rely on their
physical social networks, yet having access to that security expert is not always the case.
Therefore, we set out to train older members of the community to provide that support. We did
this through three stages in the first stage, we recruited 14 older adults and through our project
partners the University of the Third Age Whitley Bay, and the Old Low Lights Heritage Center.
We then co-developed the necessary training in order to make sure that they knew how to protect
themselves. We did this by looking at the academic literature by looking at government reports,
but also through conversations with our project partners and the CyberGuardians themselves.
So we ended up looking at password management, which was a big issue across all domains
and protection from online scams, which again was a big issue across all domains, and then looking
at protective software which was identified by the CyberGuardians as a potential issue.
After the training sessions, we had two sharing sessions, one at Month 4 and one at Month 6,
and then we had final interviews at Month 9 with all the CyberGuardians. So the bulk of our data
comes from those focus groups and interviews as well as the journals and a large scale survey.
We ended up training 14 older adults to become CyberGuardians,
and we noted that those 14 older adults shared best practice information directly with 470
citizens, whether informally or formally. And we'll talk about that more in just a second,
but we also found that those 470 citizens then shared the best practice with an additional
350 people. So those 14 older adults ended up reaching over 800 individuals with their advice.
In terms of key findings, we saw that the CyberGuardians used both informal and formal
opportunities to share security information, but it was the informal sharing opportunities
that seem to have the greatest effect. So, for example, while being at a restaurant,
cybersecurity comes up, probably an issues with passwords, and it gives him an opportunity to,
in an informal setting, just share what might be done in order to better manage passwords.
And this was pointed out by our project partner, how the informal environment, in a way, put some
older people at ease when when it comes to giving over this information. And quite importantly,
what we found from the opportunistic information sharing is that the CyberGuardians were able to
reach individuals who we would typically not be able to reach through running the traditional
training workshops and training events. For example, the cybercitizen here explains how that
that is not something that they're interested in, but they were glad that they were able to
have the conversations about how to protect themselves online effectively and in a simple way.
The behaviour change was a very interesting aspect from the project. We recruited older adults who
were not necessarily technically savvy - they knew how to use technology, but they the majority did
not have a background in it. Therefore, when we went through the behaviours on how to protect
themselves online, and these were behaviours that they were learning throughout the training
and they changed their behaviours after the training. This meant that when talking to
citizens, whether there were friends, family or completely new people, they had their experience
of changing those behaviours that they then used in order to communicate with those citizens.
So for example here the cybercitizen explains how actually being talked
through how our CyberGuardian actually changed his behaviours, helped them do it as well.
And then finally, of course there were community wellbeing benefits where having knowledgeable
people around and readily available meant that simple cybersecurity questions
could be asked and could be answered. But we also observed benefits for the
CyberGuardians where they were able to work in groups and form friendships that
lasted beyond the project. And so that is a very quick
overview of the CyberGuardians initiative. A special thanks to my co-authors, Ben, Matt,
Jack, Lynne and Jill, and of course our project Partners, University of the Third Age, Whitley
Bay, and the Old Low Light Heritage Centre, as well as our funder the Not-Equal Network Plus.