McAfee Funds Security Exhibit At Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park, where codebreakers including Alan Turing cracked Nazi communication codes in World War Two, will have an educational exhibit showing today’s visitors how to keep their own data private, thanks to funding from McAfee.

The Bletchley Park museum will open an international cyber security exhibition and learning zone in a newly-refurbished block at the site, which is growing in prominence as the importance of Bletchley’s codebreaking work – both during the war and subsequently – is realised.

McAfee’s sponsorship will pay for a full time educator/curator (job advertised here) and exhibits which will be updated to keep abreast of the fast-changing field.

Learning to be secure

“The exhibition will highlight how you use technology, and will make links to the wartime work at Bletchley,” says Bletchley Park Trust’s CEO, Iain Standen. “For instance, the German Enigma code makers were very clever, but they didn’t look for problems: they used their girlfriends’ names as passwords.”

The new visitor centre and staff member will be opened in time for the 70th anniversary of D-Day in June 2014, and funded by McAfee for five years. It will expand the facilities by restoring one more of the blocks which have been derelict since the war, so that more people can visit the site.

“We plan to double our visitor numbers in the next few years,” explains Vicki Bates, head of education at the museum. Bletchley provides a good way to enthuse children about maths and science, she said, while providing a rare opportunity for maths teachers to run a school visit.

Bates hopes the security exhibit will increase the museums attractiveness to schools and is targeting 250,000 visitors, including 16,000 school children, each year.

“The new national curriculum includes safety online, and this will increase the demand for visits,” she says.

The two organisations have been discussing the venture for a year. Talks were initiated after a McAfee employee paid a visit to the museum, and suggested supporting an exhibit would be a way to support a good cause while playing to the security firm’s strengths. McAfee already has programmes of social involvement and its staff will volunteer in the learning zone.

Bletchley has a number of other sponsors, including Google, for the main exhibits and after the initial five years, McAfee’s sponsorship could be renewed, or shifted to a different exhibit, or replaced with another commercial partner.

Do you know the history? Try our Turning Quiz