Understanding Learners’ Interests in Cybersecurity Competitions on Reddit

Cybersecurity competitions have been recognized as an effective approach to engaging students with real-world challenges. This work aims to explore the cybersecurity competition contestants’ interests and opinions by collecting and analyzing Reddit data. Reddit is a leading hub for students and professionals to exchange information and share experience. We identified a list of keywords of interest and gathered over three thousand relevant public posts. Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods are employed to gain insight into learners’ interests and opinions from the data. Our results of analyzing Reddit posts provide a complementary understanding of learners’ interests and opinions compared with the existing survey studies of cybersecurity competitions. The frequency analysis results show that the popular topics include training tools, career advice, penetration testing, CTF, and certifications. Although survey studies are more targeted, our analysis of Reddit posts provides a more complete picture of how learners’ sentiment is impacted by competitions. In the end, our analysis results enable us to discuss several practical implications of the findings and directions of future work.