CyBro - The Cyber Big Brother

Our session started with discussing pros and cons of each problem to be able to come up with the best possible prototype within the skill-set of the team members. The MyTi4, as we called ourselves, narrowed down to taking up Cyber Security Awareness as the challenge as it presented with an opportunity to offer knowledge and comfort to the wide spectrum of audience, who often lose significant personal information, money due to the cyber crimes.

Making an unsuspecting basic/average level tech user aware of the security threats that lurk around the dark corners of the Internet is a must in the rapidly growing online community in India

We started with a brain-storming session on how to approach the problem that resulted in helping us classify the user base, the types of threats and what potential soultions we can offer them... After forming basic set of hypothesis, we created a questionnaire without leading questions that might make the audience respond in certain way.

Then with the overwhelming response of over 150 participants, we had a decent sample size to draw conclusions from.

Most of the inputs we got from the survey validated our hypothesis and ideas. The key takeaways from the survey were

The data indicated people prefer a mobile based interface (via SMS, App notifications etc.) for keeping themselves up-to-date about cyber security.

People like to know authentic source of information on trusted apps and sites

A couple of inferences made were to offer real-time help to users and enable community based discussion forum where people can share their personal experiences etc. (crowd-sourced content)

So, based on these inferences we decided to create a mobile app platform that has an authenticity checking database that is up-to-date contributed by both moderators and users.

The paper prototype is very close to the final interface in terms of the content. We had loads of fun making it.

Through simple search interface user can enter suspicious websites, apps, email ids and even phone numbers to know how authentic or trustworthy the source is through a simple green, red and yellow output

More than the authenticity check, the app also offers in a user friendly manner access to the latest security threats, tips and tricks, user stories in an engaging manner delivering relevant content to the users based on their level of expertise.