From Gawker hack; 13 most common passwords used (of millions of accounts): 123456 Password 12345678 Lifehack Qwerty abc123 111111 Monkey Consumer 12345 0 Letmein Trustno1 Most common Iphone passwords: 0000, 1234, 2580 (straight shot down keypad) Most important two passwords are your email and social network? Because with email I can hit “forgotmy password” at almost any account and get the code to reset yours. With your social network I can spread a scam to all your friends and make money or spread malware. Or just embarrass you by using your account and posting silly or embarassing stuff. Sharing – lots of girls will test their friendships by saying you’re not “BFF” until you share a FB password. Or boyfriend/girlfriends will post for each other or share an account, then whenthey break up it’s a disaster.
So what about the dumb stuff we do to hurt ourselves online? Those are things that can damage our online reputation and privacy.
What we all need to know is that everything we post or send online is permanent. Even if you remove it, someone else might have kept it. Even an instant message can be stored in a history or cut and paste into a document. Here’s Alison Chang from the midwest. She went to a BBQ at her church, her photo was taken and posted to Flickr. There, because it wasn’t protected by the right copyright, it was reused in an Australian bus bench ad without her permission. She definitely didn’t get paid to be their model. And all they had to do is display in that white box in the lower left part of the ad was a credit to the Flickr photographer. This second image is of the Smith family (their real name). This was their Christmas card photo. The photographer was proud and put on her website tagged as “one happy family”. She didn’t put a copyright on it, or protect it behind a password or even put a watermark over the image to prevent someone using it. So then it was used by a Czech grocery store whose owner did a websearch for an image of a “happy family”. Without their permission and they definitely weren’t paid.
Norton did it’s own global study and found that 2/3 of adults have already been a victim. So it’s a huge problem and almost never reported. That’s why we have a disconnect (1 in 5 or 2 of 3). Cybercrime is a huge problem, driven by an underground economy of people buying and selling our private information for financial gain. Cybercrime includes: More recent data Viruses/malware 51% Online scams 10% Phishing 9% Social network hacking 7% Online credit card fraud 7% Sexual predation 7%
Who is this kid? He represents the old school virus writer. Well, it used to be someone who looked a lot like this: a computer geek squirreled away in a basement somewhere spreading viruses as a prank to prove how smart he was. And his work looked like this….a virus that was more of a nuisance – maybe just a silly graphic of running across your screen. Some of you may recall the Ambulance Virus, which was popular in the late ’80’s. The good old days of computer viruses, no one lost money and it was just a big annoyance.
This is where kids get into trouble. We think they are safe because we installed security software but we let our kids use the Admin account (where they can install and uninstall things on the family computer) or they don’t know not to ignore security software warnings. Also if you give a kid an iPod but not a way to get music legally, you’ve created a pirate. That brings us to peer to peer software. Some of it is legal but most isn’t and downloading free music is usually stealing. Kids who don’t know what they are doing are inviting the criminals directly into your computer. There’s nothing the software can do to stop them since by definition when you install peer to peer, you are opening a port on your computer where traffic is allowed. Crooks know this and regularly scan the networks of connected music sharing computers, looking for financial records. The Today show recently did a story on a family whose tax refund was stolen by a crook who found their tax return’s digital image (from their online filing), registered a change of address for them at the IRS and received (and cashed) the family’s refund check.
Cyberbullying is such a common issue, it’s one parents need to prepare for, the way we prepare to teach our kids to drive. Even if your child is never a target or a bully, they’ll probably see it and be effected by that exposure alone. Make sure they know you get it and can be a help.
The images on the right are possibly familiar to you. They are children who committed suicide due to ongoing cyberbullying and other forms of cruelty. Phoebe Prince of Massachusetts, Tyler Clementi of New Jersey, Megan Meier of Missouri. Cyberbullying is a huge problem. We need to be mostly concerned, not with the one off mean message of a kid being “a kid” but with repetition or ongoing cruelty. It can take so many different forms, it might be anonymous but your child will likely know who is involved if asked. Few kids tell their parents or a trusted adult. So while schools now have policies about cyberbullying and 43 of 50 states have laws about it, and school counselors now have an ethical obligation to address cyberbullying in their charter, many who reported it in the past to school staff say it made matters worse. Schools are not perfect when it comes to delaing with it, even though it impacts the students ability to learn, it can create a hostile environment and it can contribute to a child developing depression. We have to educate our children about being the same in person as you are online, also about the permanency of digital communication. Teach kids not to respond to cyberbullying , to keep a copy (cut and paste into word processing), tell school (especially if they know their bully and their school has a cyberbullying policy) if threats or violence is implied, immediately report it to local law enforcement. , etc. Most kids are trying to the right thing online and off but we do need more schools to teach the importance of character and appropriate behavior.
Parents must be aware of cyberbullying and teach their kids to recognize and report it. Talk to your child about how you could work together if it happened. If it does, make sure you don’t respond to the bully. Keep a copy of any on screen message, no matter how embarassing. And if you are a bystander (meaning you were sent a link to a mean website, copied on an email, etc) make sure you reach out to the victim/target to express friendship, sympathy, offer a diversion together (like ‘let’s get together after school and work on math’) If the bullying is serious enough, get police involved. If it’s impacting the school environment, (child is afraid to go to school, feels like everyone is laughing at them, etc) then report to the school, the teacher or principal, counselor or resource officer. But parents need to drive process, leave a paper trail, review the school policy, ask for an action plan in writing. Stay on top of things and demand a respones. (from Allison Trachthill) theAmerican School Counselor Association has updated its ethical standards. Now, confronting cyberbullying is an ethical obligation for school counselors. Section A.10.e of the Ethical Standards for School Counselors states that school counselors should, "Consider the extent to which cyberbullying is interfering with students’ educational process and base guidance curriculum and intervention programming for this pervasive and potentially dangerous problem on research-based and best practices."