Partner Article

Businesses will benefit from digital natives

Children’s Commissioner, Dr Maggie Atkinson, who has stated that Britain’s children risk becoming ‘cyber recluses’ and stated that is everyone’s duty to ensure that children do not become victims of the web’s ‘darker side’.

As an IT security professional and the father of four children aged 14, 12, 8 and 8, I certainly feel that I have a responsibility to both educate and protect my children about the benefits and dangers of the online world. I take the view that using the web for research, entertainment and communication is a life skill and that children should be taught how to do this safely.

My children have two MacBooks, four iPads and three iPhones between them. They use the Internet for the usual social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Vine, as well as for general browsing and email. All of their devices are restricted and tracked and they do not have the ability to change these settings themselves. I feel that this tracking functionality is a very important feature to enable and one that, hopefully, I will never have to use.

We have taught them the importance of watching what they share online and making sure they do not post any silly or inappropriate images onto services such as Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram. I set the privacy settings on photo sharing services such as Flickr and also tend to monitor who they are interacting with, to ensure that, as far as possible, everything is above board. I always tell them to let me know straight away if anybody ever tries to make contact with them who they do not know.

Following the security penetration tests that my business has carried out for numerous organisations and seeing how easy it is to guess the passwords used by their employees, I have educated all of my children about the importance of using strong passwords and to avoid reusing the same passwords for different sites. Where possible, I set the services up for them and make sure that the security and privacy settings are correctly configured.

I take a bit of the load myself as I have a good home network consisting of a Cisco ASA firewall linked to a Squid proxy that performs transparent caching and filtering so I can block nasty URLs. My children are aware that I can also use this network to check what they do online. I can also filter devices based on time schedules, so it’s possible to restrict the amount of time that they spend online in the evening, so that they don’t become ‘cyber recluses’. We’re surrounded by gorgeous Yorkshire countryside, so I want them to spend time getting some fresh air too.

As the holidays come to an end and our children return to school, we mustn’t forget that children are inquisitive by nature and the web is an amazing learning resource. The digital skills they learn now will also contribute to the success of businesses in the future. The best we can do is to create a safe framework of operation for them and provide the necessary support, so that they will let us know if anything does go wrong. I agree with the Children’s Commissioner that we all have a duty to protect children from the negative elements on the web. As a parent with network and web security expertise, I feel that duty more than most.

Reference:

The Independent, “Web’s dark side, what parents can do to fight back, by Children’s Commissioner,“15th August 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/webs-dark-side-what-parents-can-do-to-fight-back-by-childrens-commissioner-9672229.html

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Mason .