This was one of the first sessions we delivered in person after the COVID-19 lockdowns: a cyber awareness programme for students and faculty at B.M.S. College of Engineering (BMSCE), Bengaluru.
A room full of people again
After two years of webinars, a full lecture hall felt like a different profession. Online sessions are efficient and they scale, but they hide the thing that makes awareness training work: the question someone only asks because the person next to them asked one first.
Awareness spreads through conversation. Two years of muted microphones had taught us how much that matters.
A post-pandemic threat picture
The timing shaped the content. The pandemic had pushed education, work and payments online at speed, and attackers had followed:
- Phishing built around remote learning platforms, scholarships and job offers.
- Account takeover, driven by passwords reused across college, personal and payment accounts.
- Scams on UPI and digital wallets aimed squarely at students.
- Personal devices doing academic work on home networks, with no one to call when something looked wrong.
We covered the defences that actually hold: long unique passphrases with a password manager, multi-factor authentication everywhere it is offered, scepticism about urgency, and the habit of reporting a suspicious message rather than quietly deleting it.
Our thanks to BMS College of Engineering for having us, and for being among the first to bring students back into a room to talk about this.
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