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cybersecurity education for school-aged children isn’t doing a great job of talking about online safety
This sentence pretty much sums it up. School's give them a computer, lock it down and put them in a bubble of safe websites and only tell them "there's a virus boogyman who will get you if youre not careful"
As someone in gen z, I find that most get scammed trying to buy stupid shit. Discounted v bucks, expensive clothing for stupid cheap, stuff like that. Oh and temu, of course. They also get phished pretty easily as well.
My niece is 14/15, and she gave all her bank account details to some guy on Tiktok who said he wanted to send her 5000$.
There is an absolute failure in the teaching of online safety and critical thinking. The fault lies mostly on the parents, absolutely, but it needs to be taught in schools, like taxes (my kid is currently learning about how to file taxes in one of his classes).
I've taught my kid about all types of things and the "why" behind it: don't click links in email or messages, spotting ragebait content & not engaging with it, what is & isn't appropriate to talk about with a stranger online, the intentions behind the actions and words of a potential predator, etc.
Teach your kid to question things. Always give an answer to "why", ALWAYS!!!! Because if you don't give access to the logic behind things, they will simply start to accept everything at face value without any thinking. Worse yet, if they don't believe there's logic behind your decisions and words, they will disregard your advice and simply do whatever they want.
Always give an answer to “why”, ALWAYS!!!
I love these questions from my daughter. It's wild to me that some people ignore this stuff or tell kids to stop asking...
I was shocked when my sister fell for a phishing scam that got her Steam account snatched. I thought for sure that her school taught her about those....
Valve will NEVER message you over Discord for any reason, ever.
I teach IT to seniors and in the last ~3 years the types of digital trouble my students find themselves in has shifted.
We used to spend a lot of lessons talking about phishing scams, link safety, URL verification, etc. Our pop up sessions would involve lots of calling banks to get cards cancelled after mistakes were made.
But now my lessons are on "oh, that one is a real Toll text, you should have paid that, I know they used to send them in the mail and this text looks like a scam, but that's how they do it now, and you really do owe that money to the police, that's why you're getting phone calls from the police, it's not a spoofing scam, you missed a real toll notice, I'm so sorry, it was buried in your spam folder"
Older people got the memo about scams and they got block happy, now they ignore real notices.
I've done the same thing, I was getting texts for parking fines and permit renewals and I don't have a lisence because I'm visually impaired so obviously a scam.
Only I forgot that when I was 16 grandma gave me her old car, I was like "the fuck do I do with this" so I gave the keys to my little brother and moved out.
15 years later, turns out the car has been in my name the whole time, which makes sense, I don't remember signing anything about the car ever. My brother had no idea his permit was even expired because they were sending the text to the owner contactvia the car rego, not the drivers contact details my brother provided, and because I'd been ignoring the texts it took a while to iron out with the council, especially because my brother and "my" car are not just in another state, but another territory.