Project-based Teaching Aid for Secondary Education on Cyberattacks and Countermeasures

The global demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to outpace the available workforce, creating a critical gap that must be addressed through early education. This paper presents a project-based teaching aid designed for secondary education to inspire students to learn cybersecurity in secondary school classrooms and pursue careers in cybersecurity. The teaching aid employs the Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC) as a lens to examine cyberattacks and includes three hands-on laboratory exercises that illustrate common cyberattacks and their countermeasures. While this paper focuses on three specific labs for illustration, the lab set is designed to be modular and expandable, enabling the integration of additional cybersecurity topics and attack scenarios. The project leverages free and open-source technologies, ensuring accessibility and equity by enabling web-based remote desktop connections to the lab infrastructure, making it easily implementable by secondary school educators. With most existing hands-on curricula designed for collegiate-level instruction and requiring significant technical setup, this work fills a crucial gap by providing age-appropriate and more accessible lab materials for secondary cybersecurity education.