Zero Day Security

A gamified security awareness course where small & medium sized businesses can start their security from Day Zero.

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Our Team

Iridescence is comprised of Grant Upson and Josephine Michalek. We don’t have formal roles because we are doing everything together, but Grant is doing a larger portion of the website, and Jozey is doing a larger portion of the business aspects. Grant is a second year Bachelor of ICT student at UTAS in Launceston. Jozey is a recent Bachelor of ICT graduate in Hobart and currently is a Business and Systems Analyst at TasmaNet.

Inspiration

Small businesses are connecting their business to the internet but have no idea on how to secure themselves against malicious threats. With the increasing amount of hacks and data breaches, it is expected to be hacked at some point in time. Up to 60% of businesses failing within six months of being hacked, this is unacceptable when most problems can be mitigated by simple tactics rather than technical ones.

What it does

Zero Day Security is a gamified security awareness course. It is only one of two gamified security courses in existence. We are unique because we are the only gamified security awareness course which is aimed at small businesses, is not technical so it can be understood by anyone, and is affordable for small businesses. Simply get the course for for a small per user one-off fee, and start learning! Our awareness course is broken up into short and sweet modules, each has simple educational points for the topic, some quiz questions, and culminates into an immersive, time-sensitive, “choose your own path” scenario which simulates a real security situation you might find yourself in. The better you do, the more achievements and points you get. Compete with other people in your organisation and see your rank go up if you can do better! All modules are repeatable to allow you to improve. We also have a more advanced and technical security course, for a little bit more money, if you have trained your employees in the basic awareness course and find you want to invest a little more money to one or two of your employees. Additionally, for our premium product, we offer specialist on-demand security consulting, which varies in cost depending on how much time you think you might need with the consultant. Lastly, we collect depersonalized security data which is analysed and sold as an extra revenue stream, which also helps other organisations with statistics and business improvements.

How we built it

Wireframes were drawn and then converted into a website. We built the website currently as a static site made up of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Target Market

Our target market is small to medium sized businesses, which in Australia alone is 2.1 million businesses according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2016, and is increasing year on year. Any business, especially the largest chunk of small businesses, can benefit from simple, gamified security awareness.

Financial Breakdown of Costs

The startup costs are very little. The website development is straightforward and is handled by our team. Hosting is also very inexpensive, around 400AUD per year for a quality website hoster which us allows us to implement what we need, how we need, with great support, uptime and of course security. After this, the majority of the costs would be associated with marketing (online and through professional bodies), and then having more security expert HR for the consulting.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was to incorporate enough gamification elements to make the education fun, engaging, and inclusive. The time constraint is also a major challenge so time management at its finest was required! Trying to contain the scope of the project for the purposes of the hackathon and not being too pedantic about functionality and perfection of user interfaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Providing a solution to help businesses understand security better. Proud of Grant using Jozey's code (going in completely blind) and being able to work with it without hiccups.

What we learned

Pitching in three minutes feels like one minute. Also learned various coding techniques such as pagination in jQuery. Learned more about business viability and the importance of planning. We have been friends for many years but never worked together one something, so this was definitely a great time to put our minds together, and we found we could work very well together!

University Research Themes

Zero Day Security aligns with Creativity, Culture and Society under “Media Transformation” and “Local and Global Society”, as well as Data, Knowledge and Decisions under “Data Integration”.

What's next for Zero Day Security

We would love to further develop this website into a dynamic fully launched MVP and start marketing it to industry bodies and small to medium sized businesses. Our vision is to have every business aware about security and how it increasingly affects businesses in this online age, and have the know-how to do basic mitigation strategies to protect their businesses. This is a very scalable business as the majority of it is online, and the hardest thing to scale is to get more HR for security consulting, but this does not impact the original awareness intention for businesses.

Try It Out

To see our progress on our website so far, download our GitHub repository linked later on and open the HTML pages to have a look. (Start with double clicking index.html to open it on your browser and clicking through the website! Make sure you unzip the folder first.)

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