Speakers
Synopsis
How we learn as kids differs greatly to how we learn as adults.
When I was at school cyber education consisted of how to use a computer, touch-type, making basic programs, and cybersecurity was basic firewall settings, keeping Anti-virus software up to date, and don’t get a virus from a bad website.
Today children have a frightful level of access & exposure to things like social media, online goods & services, and technology with far greater dangers to those that were around even 5,10, or more years ago, but in-school education is still lacking.
Everyday parents are going online and to media outlets crying out for education in schools, and not just for secondary school children, but every level.
Two examples of this:
1st) My adult niece & nephew, had no idea what metadata was, why they needed certain privacy settings on their devices, why not to plug in USB’s & cables they find, because they weren’t taught how people obtain data without being given it directly, seeing it displayed somewhere online, or opening bad emails.
2nd) Recently read about a teenager who was sent food by a stranger via uber eats, the teenager was given a link to the stranger’s profile by their friends, who said if they spoke to the person, they would send them free stuff, not realizing that they were giving this person access to all their sensitive data.
Even some tertiary students don’t seem to grasp the concept of things like basic-cyber-hygiene, my own cyber security class had people sharing usb’s, files, and programs with each other, people plugging into unfamiliar ports or connecting to open Wi-Fi sources, not thinking about whether the person or network they were sharing with was secure.
There needs to be specific cyber security education programs/classes, taught by industry professionals at least every 3 months, for the upper grades of primary school, all of high school, and as an induction unit in every tertiary institution.
Cyber Awareness Training:
Because there’s no current standard for Cyber Education in schools, Cyber Awareness Training in the professional workforce is currently doing the heavy lifting but it is more like playing catchup, rather than reenforcing, or even maintaining good practices.
The reason for this is that by the time people come across cyber awareness, they’ve already developed a lifetime of bad habits, that the training can struggle to undo, as a result, in 2023 it was reported that 95% of cyber security breaches resulted from human error.
We need to push for greater training and knowledge, to safeguard the future.
Summary:
Why, as cyber professionals, do we need to know any of this?
We need to know this because we need to get cyber education into schools, universities, and businesses, to strengthen our industry at the most fundamental level for future generations, turning our human last-line-defense into our human shield, to reduce the 95% of data breaches caused by human error, and most importantly… to protect our kids.
