Cybersecurity training games on passwords, phishing and online safety: three compared

The three games below come from a public broadcaster, a program hosted on Google's withgoogle.com and a federal agency. Each maker page was opened in November 2026, and all three showed the real page.

They aim at different players. Cybersecurity Lab puts the player in charge of a company under attack. Interland is a four-world adventure built around online behavior. The flashcards are a quiz on terms. None of the pages states a price.

NOVA's page describes Cybersecurity Lab as a game in which the player defends a company that is the target of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. The challenges include cracking passwords and crafting code, and the related video quizzes cover why the Internet is insecure, how codes protect online secrets, what motivates hackers and caution about online posting. The page names support from Lockheed Martin and links an educator guide. Players can use a guest pass, but progress is saved only after signing in with Google or PBS.

Interland has four worlds, each with its own message: Kind Kingdom ("It's Cool to Be Kind"), Reality River ("Don't Fall for Fake"), Mindful Mountain ("Share with Care") and Tower of Treasure ("Secure Your Secrets"). The page gives controls for keyboard and touch and suggests tilting a device to landscape mode. It names no age range.

The Department of Education flashcards cover topics such as phishing, passwords and multifactor authentication. The page offers them as an interactive online game or as a printable document and names no audience.

For a classroom that wants one session on passwords and codes, Cybersecurity Lab is the only one of the three that builds a story around them. Interland suits a lesson on online behavior more than on technical defense. The flashcards are the quickest way to test vocabulary.

The Interland page mentions tapping and tilting, so it is built for touch screens as well as keyboards. The Department of Education page is the only one of the three that offers a printable version for classrooms without devices.

Security training for ordinary users centers on habits: choosing passwords, spotting a fake message, deciding what to share online and protecting an account with a second step. Those habits are decided in seconds and repeated every day. A game can rehearse them by making the player choose and then showing the consequence. The three games here work at the user level. None of them teaches how to configure a network or write secure code, a topic that shows up instead in research grants such as the Purdue secure coding project on the funding page.

Interland runs in a browser with keyboard and touch controls, which suits a tablet. Cybersecurity Lab runs on the NOVA Labs website and is the only one of the three whose page mentions signing in, so a class should test the guest pass before the lesson. The flashcards are the choice for a room without devices, since they come as a printable file.

No page states a price, and among the three only the Cybersecurity Lab page links an educator guide. Age and audience are left open by the Interland and flashcard pages, so a teacher has to judge fit by playing first. The Cybersecurity Lab entry and the Interland entry carry the details.

Each cybersecurity game above carries the label it had in the month shown in its checked column; the games directory explains what every label means. All three games on this page were Playable at the last reading.