Cyber Security Education From Childhood Is Becoming Vital

Uploaded on 2024-01-29 in NEWS-Cybersecurity News, JOBS-Training, FREE TO VIEW

In an increasingly digitised society, and especially considering that children are using technology more and more at an earlier age, it is crucial for education to focus on how to use this global tool safely. Technology offers great advantages in education, culture and entertainment, but also presents risks that they need to know about.

The 2022 report Why Children are Unsafe in Cyberspace from the Global Cybersecurity Forum found that 72% of children around the world have experienced at least one type of cyber threat online. This is very alarming because it can impact the mental and physical health, integrity and privacy of the youngest people.

The report confirms the growing challenges faced in protecting children in cyberspace, especially in times when 90% of children over 8 years old are already active online but only 40% of their parents are aware that their child have experienced a cyber threat in the past.

The leading cybersecurity firm Check Point considers that even if the efforts to respond with increased awareness and implement new security measures are growing, they are still not enough.

The threats faced by children are very different and, in most cases, they are not aware of them and parents are clueless about these threats as well. It is therefore critical to take preventive measures now to ensure the protection of children online.

These are some of the main measures to protect them:

Learning cyber security through play: Play is always a great tool to teach children, because when they learn having fun, they acquire concepts more effectively. In this way, practical exercises can be proposed that simulate threats so they will learn how to protect themselves.

It is also possible to develop apps and online games to help them acquire this knowledge, recognise threats, and know how to protect their personal data.

Ethics as a banner: Teaching cyber security always comes with an ethical component because it is very important to instil ethical principles for the development of future responsible citizens. The development of technological skills should come with a conscious use of them.

Demystifying the hacker: It is essential that children understand all the complexities of this figure. A hacker can be a cyber criminal who causes harm to the computer systems but that there are also “good hackers” or “White hats” that use their computer knowledge ethically to identify potential system breaches or errors in companies and fix them to prevent attacks.

Cyber security in the educational curriculum: One of the main strategies to prevent threats affecting minors is cyber security education in school. Cyber security is a pending subject in schools, and it would be very useful to raise awareness among children about risks and to teach them some tools to protect themselves.

For this, it is crucial to have educators with digital knowledge and highly recommended that they offer such cybersecurity talks so that parents can also have some basic knowledge of how to help their child protect themselves online.

Creating a secure network: Cchildren also need to know how to create secure networks to prevent potential threats, one of the most common being phishing. This threat lies in using emails to deceive people into clicking on malicious links or attachments. Sometimes, these emails are very difficult to detect, especially for children, because they appear to come from a familiar person, such as a friend or a family member.

For this reason, it is necessary for them to learn how to detect when a cyberattack may be compromising their network, use secure passwords as an additional barrier, protect their social media where they spend a lot of hours on, and recognise phishing attacks.

It is very harmful that children at such young ages are exposed to cyber risks, because it could jeopardise their emotional health, physical integrity, and privacy. In this way, it is essential that children receive cyber security education to know how to identify threats and have tools to respond with.

In this sense, kids can feel safer online, and at the same time building a more aware and responsible society in the use of new technologies.

Image: Julia M Cameron

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