When we think about escape rooms, the first thing that comes to mind is a themed room, which must be ‘escaped’ by the participating players. The theme possibilities are flexible and potentially endless.

The Massachusetts Army National Guard has kicked this flexibility up a notch by working with Integrated Exhibits Inc. to design a cyber and network security themed escape room. The idea behind this is to reinforce the player’s knowledge on cyber security and improve defence against hackers.

Each room contains seven computers, a conference table and pop-up workstations, a desk, file cabinet, wall-mounted touch screen monitors, white boards and two wall pictures. High-res cameras provide feeds of the entire room, which are fed to the command room that has a server and networking equipment and allows officials to monitor each room.

The rooms are designed for seven players each, and the players must solve five of 25 cyber security puzzles that will eventually unlock the five door locks. The challenges are tricky and involve cyber security related features such as: binary code, IP address, system logs and building a secure infrastructure to protect data as it moves from storage to database.

The idea was such a success that various federal agencies in the United States, such as the Washington State Department of Revenue and the Virginia State Corporation Commission, have adopted the format to improve the cyber security knowledge of their employees.

Find out more at: https://gcn.com/articles/2019/...