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Students in Whitney Poucher鈥檚 cybersecurity education courses are no strangers to highly technical topics. At Greenbrier High School in Georgia鈥檚 Columbia County district, they learn how hackers monitor users鈥� systems to exploit weaknesses, and staff from the nearby U.S. Army fort drop in to give lectures.

But some of the most relevant lessons are also the simplest.

One incident at the school stands out in Poucher鈥檚 memory: A student opened another鈥檚 email account, impersonating that peer and sending a threatening email message to another classmate. The victim hadn鈥檛 logged out of an account on a public work station, which allowed the other student access.

Now, said Poucher, she makes sure to emphasize basic, practical security precautions鈥攍ike logging out of public computers鈥攊n her courses.

Facing an increasing array of daily security threats, schools like Greenbrier are teaching what is being dubbed 鈥渃yber hygiene,鈥� the basic cybersecurity habits that will keep students safe online at home and on their school networks. As reports of large-scale cyber attacks targeting business and government institutions have multiplied in recent years, cybersecurity education has come into national focus. Across the country, schools are implementing workforce-oriented courses to prepare students for careers in designing and protecting networks.

Profound Consequences

Cyber hygiene is foundational for students on these pathways, argue some educators and privacy advocates, though they also believe it has broader relevance. It鈥檚 not only IT specialists who deal with sensitive information online. Training in best practices can help middle and high school students protect their personal computers, understand the difference between ethical and unethical hacking, and prepare them to confront the digital threats they will face in the workplace.

At the same time, the challenge is to present lessons on cybersecurity habits in ways that engage, rather than overwhelm, students and resonate with their daily experiences, educators and advocates say. Teachers also say there鈥檚 a need to remind students of the ethical choices that come with making decisions about how they use technology.

As targeted cyberattacks, like phishing, become more sophisticated, schools have a vested interest in helping take security precautions, said Jonathan King, the chief strategy officer at i-SAFE, a provider of curricula on cybersecurity, privacy, and digital citizenship. Counting teachers, administrative staff, students, and parents, districts have an 鈥渋nordinate鈥� amount of users on their systems, said King.

鈥淎nything they can do to help mitigate irregular use on their infrastructure helps them in the long run,鈥� he said.

As soon as students begin using devices in the classroom, teachers and administrators need to start having age-appropriate discussions about staying safe and protected, said Kevin Nolten, the director of academic outreach for the National Integrated Cyber Education Research Center. The center develops cybersecurity curricula for schools to integrate across disciplines.

鈥淲hen I walk into a kindergarten class, and they have a set of iPads that they鈥檙e utilizing, we need to begin having a conversation about security,鈥� said Nolten.

At that age, he said, teachers can talk with students about the purpose and use of passwords, and other, broader questions. Why do we secure certain information? Why might we want a private space online?

When they鈥檙e working with older students, teachers can draw connections to current events. Poucher said she keeps her high school students up to date on news about ever-evolving cyber attacks, like phishing scams, that could target them at home or at school. 鈥淭he best defense,鈥� she said, 鈥渋s understanding the offense.鈥�

Drawing direct connections to situations that users could actually experience makes cybersecurity warnings stick, said Michelle Mazurek, an assistant professor in computer science at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. That鈥檚 why demonstrating the consequences of a specific action, like leaving an account open on a public computer, is a good strategy, said Mazurek, whose research is focused on building systems to support users鈥� security and privacy behaviors and preferences.

鈥淚f you hear a story about something that went wrong, and you say, 鈥業 would never do that,鈥� that鈥檚 less effective,鈥� she said.

But one of the risks in cyber-education programs鈥攆or students or adults鈥攊s that the audiences are overloaded with warnings and other information, Mazurek said. People have 鈥渓imited bandwidth鈥� to make changes in their daily routines, even if they know what security precautions they should be taking, she said. Focusing on a few crucial, actionable steps鈥攇enerating strong passwords, updating software, being cautious of scams鈥攎akes it more likely that people will actually follow advice.

In the Bossier Parish school system in Louisiana, many students get those types of lessons through the CyberPatriot program, a national competition for middle and high school students run by the Air Force Association. Students practice in local teams to run an IT simulation, in which they manage the network of a small company. The district also offers cyber literacy and cyber science electives, taught with National Integrated Cyber Education Research Center curriculum materials, for high schoolers, and fields CyberPatriot teams at the middle and high school level.

Parsing Cyber Ethics

Lessons that prepare students for the competition touch on topics like how to craft a strong password, safe browsing tips, and websites that pose security risks (online shopping and social media are at the top of the list).

A step-by-step guide on spotting phishing attempts shows a sample email and labels the telltale signs: Messages are sent from a spoofed sender address, and generally ask the recipient to click through a link to input personally identifiable information.

For most of the students she鈥檚 worked with, these warnings are new information, said Charlene Cooper, an instructional coach at Cope Middle School in the Bossier Parish system and a CyberPatriot coach.

Most students don鈥檛 immediately make the connection that the kinds of cyber attacks unleashed on banks or government agencies could happen closer to home, said Marco Reyes, a cyber literacy teacher at Bossier High School.

Learning about attacks and security in school settings make it clear that these are concrete concerns, with profound consequences, he said.

Those consequences are especially apparent when the school is the site of an attack.

One Friday last school year, Nathan Mielke was getting ready for a cybersecurity-themed homeroom lesson at Hartford Union High School in Wisconsin. A few minutes after the period was supposed to start, a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack cut off access to the internet.

Mielke, the director of technology services in the high school district, said that to this day, leadership isn鈥檛 sure whether a student or an outside actor was responsible.

鈥淏ut I will tell you that after we talked to students face to face about it, it stopped,鈥� he wrote in an email.

He used the network failure as a teachable moment, explaining what happened and how the attack blocks internet connectivity, in follow-up announcements and in the school newsletter.

Grounding cybersecurity lessons in conversations about right and wrong can steer students away from mischief-minded experiments, said Nolten, of the national research center.

鈥淚t鈥檚 not only important to teach a student how to push the gas pedal,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e鈥檝e also got to teach them how to push the brake.鈥�

In Columbia County, Ga., Poucher teaches her students how to use a virtually protected network, or VPN, which allows users to securely access a private network and still share data through public networks. Protected networks can insulate users from hackers and surveillance online, Poucher explains to students, so they can be a safer alternative to public networks at coffee shops and hotels.

But she stresses to her classes that using the same technology at school can violate district policy, because it can be used to bypass the school鈥檚 internet filtering software. In that case, she said, students would be trying to avoid protections put in place by administrators meant to keep them safe.

In Poucher鈥檚 classes, students learn how to parse the sometimes messy distinctions between moral and immoral, and safe and risky, behaviors.

鈥淭eaching them the responsibility that they have over themselves,鈥� she said, 鈥渋s huge.鈥�