ltt-c2-turkiye - Protect Your Digital Way Today and Tomorrow

C2. Get the Key and You'll Be Safe

1. Description of the LTT Mobility – Short-term exchanges of groups of pupils

The LTT session in Turkey was structured in a 5 days program dedicated to the exchange of groups of students involved in the mobility. The program was focused on the cybersecurity essentials student-oriented, since, nowadays, groups are able to collect and use massive amounts of data, and students have to be informed about the digital threats and not get influenced by a wrong behaviour. Workshops for students were organized during the mobility and included the following topics:

Day 1- An informative workshop for students regarding the Cybersecurity Essentials: malware and malicious code, types of malware (viruses, worms, ransomware)

Day 2- Workshop and creation of cybersecurity interactive presentations.

Day 3- Programming workshops – Introduction to Cryptography. Hands-on Cryptography.

Day 4- Programming workshops – Cryptography in Scratch, Python and other programming languages. Creation in groups of simple programs for text codification.

Day 5- Meetings with an expert in digital hacking and representatives of the Department of Organized Crime from the Turkish Police.

The students were informed about how to recognize as being a target for a digital threat in the online environment and the methods to protect. When a threat is materialized, our learners must to know what to do, how to minimize the effects. Knowing the threats, their effects and how to avoid and mitigate them is not enough. The LTT was successful in reinforcing this knowledge and advised them to apply what they learned in the day-to-day life by exercises and contests. Furthermore, since there is a large request for specialists in digital security, we managed to attract the students in this field, the students involved were all representatives of the ICT and STEAM educational profile. The cryptography is a very attractive field for children so we selected a few simple cryptographic algorithms, some used from ancient times and we will learn our students how to program applications to obscure a small text messages. The outcomes of the mobility were: 9 interactive presentations, 9 simple programs for text codification, 1 online history of cryptography, including an interactive dictionary on cryptography, 3 Scratch animations on the jobs of the future. The training session will be integrated within the school’s normal activities by involving students from the school during the workshops and frontal discussions and presentations. In spite of the pandemics, we managed to organize the mobility therefore the activity was carried out physically in September 2021.

2. Benefits of the meeting:

By including cybersecurity concepts and possible threatening situations when not applying IT security rules since young ages, we created the opportunity for these students to become a new generation of employees informed about digital liabilities that can make their future employment companies much more safer and can diminish the number of security errors caused by a single man’s error. after attending specific workshops, the students are now able to recognize security attacks, threats, liabilities, they know how to minimize their effect or, even to prevent such security issues. Another important benefit for the students participating in the mobility was that of achieving certain security competences needed in the field of activity of digital security. By attending the programming workshops, they can now understand how hackers work and also the gravity of using programs without proper license. Furthermore, the meetings with digital experts have created for students the opportunity for future careers or future choices in this domain, both for male and female students. Nevertheless, by using learning platforms, the students had the opportunity to simulate phishing attacks. All students participating in the meeting gave testimonials about the importance of being part of the Erasmus programme and about their achieved experience and knowledge during the mobility in Adana.