InfoSec Cinema: Using Films for Information Security Teaching

We present InfoSec Cinema, a film-based teaching activity that uses commercial films to teach information security. We analyse ten films to verify their suitability and build a public and editable database of information security events from films. Our findings show that most films embed enough security events to be used as a teaching tool. This could be used to produce information security teaching activities for a very wide range of audiences. Our experience in running two sessions of InfoSec Cinema was positive. Students were able to identify the most relevant events and even designed mitigations to avoid the problems that were depicted during the film. We also learned that the identification of security events greatly depends on the background and personality of the viewer.