The Social Engineer: An Immersive Virtual Reality Educational Game to Raise Social Engineering Awareness

As system infrastructures are becoming more secure against technical attacks, it is more difficult for attackers to overcome them with technical means. Social engineering instead exploits the human factor of information security and can have a significant impact on organizations. The lack of awareness about social engineering favors the successful realization of social engineering attacks, as employees do not recognize them as such early enough, resulting in high costs for the affected company. Current training approaches and awareness courses are limited in their versatility and create little motivation for employees to deal with the topic. The high immersion of virtual reality can improve learning in this context. We created The Social Engineer, an immersive educational game in virtual reality, to raise awareness and to sensitize players about social engineering. The player impersonates a penetration tester and conducts security audits in a virtually simulated company. The game consists of a detailed game world containing three distinct missions that require the player to apply different social engineering attack methods. Our concept enables the game to be highly extensible and flexible regarding different playable scenarios and settings. The Social Engineer can potentially benefit companies as an immersive self-training tool for their employees, support security experts in teaching social engineering awareness as part of a comprehensive training course, and entertain interested individuals by leveraging fun and innovative gameplay mechanics.