Using Generative AI to Assist In Learning; The Struggle to Improve Cybersecurity in the United States

This capstone project focuses on Azure Chaos Studio, a service designed to help users and companies improve application resilience. Data showed that new users faced high failure rates when creating their first experiment, lowering user retention. To address this, I used Microsoft’s Copilot to create a handler that could either guide users through experiment creation or deploy one automatically. By analyzing customer usage data, I found the most-used services and those with the highest failure rates, and targeted those during development. Using Copilot libraries, I developed a handler that takes user inputs and then provides feedback and deploys experiments. While the handler successfully assisted users, further improvements and more rigorous testing were needed beyond the project’s limited timeframe.
This research report seeks to discuss the question, “How may cybersecurity be improved?”. More specifically, this report will consider what organizations and companies are currently doing to promote better cybersecurity practices and analyze their motivations and approaches. Furthermore, literature will be considered as well when looking at methods to improve cybersecurity awareness. This report will discuss the positives and negatives of different strategies, and consider why a strategy may have been selected by a participant over other possible options. As mentioned prior, employee training reduces the average cost of a data breach the most, as a significant number of breaches are a result of human error, primarily by users and employees. Educating people with even basic knowledge can significantly reduce the likelihood that someone finds themselves as part, or even the source, of a data breach. As such, analyzing approaches to educating the average user and increasing cybersecurity awareness is paramount to not only helping companies protect their customer’s data, but also safeguard the public from malicious actors.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Rosanne Vrugtman
STS Advisors: Bryn Seabrook, Peter Norton