Building a University-wide Automated Information Assurance Awareness Exercise

Students in an academic environment regularly install malware such as viruses and spyware on their personal computers and then connect to institutional automation resources. Malware reduces personal productivity and places a strain on university automation resources such as network bandwidth, email servers and enterprise storage servers. Technical products to malware detection and removal provide only a partial solution. Student education on information awareness can provide another vector to help deter malware installation. To test the effect of the information assurance education already in place at the United States Military Academy, we designed, built and ran an information awareness exercise system across the entire student body. The exercise was designed to target those counter-productive behaviors most prevalent in the student body. This paper discusses how we implemented the system and the results of the exercise.