My neighbor's kid explained phishing to me and I felt old

I was out front edging my lawn last Saturday when this 12 year old from two doors down came over and asked if my email was 'password1234.' I laughed and said no, but then he started talking about how his school taught them to spot fake login pages by checking the URL before the first slash. He showed me on his phone how a tiny spelling difference can trick people. Made me wonder if schools are actually doing a better job teaching this stuff than most adults learn on their own. Has anyone else had a young kid school them on basic security?

3 comments

3 Comments

river95210d ago

The funny thing is, schools finally catching up while most adults I know still click on stuff without a second thought. My buddy who works in IT says the biggest security breaches at his company come from senior staff falling for obvious phishing emails. Maybe that 12 year old should start a side business teaching basic security to grown adults. Probably make more money than lemonade stands.

valc9110d ago

River's right about the senior staff thing, reminds me of my uncle who's a retired teacher. He got an email saying his Netflix account was suspended and he needed to click a link to renew, except he doesn't even have Netflix. He still almost clicked it. Kids these days are growing up with all this stuff built into their bones, while adults are still trying to figure out which end of the phone is up. My cousin's daughter is 10 and she's already explaining two-factor authentication to her grandma. It's like watching a foreign language get taught backwards, the little ones are the translators now.

reese_lee910d ago

Read an article recently that said kids are actually better at spotting scams because they grew up with constant digital literacy lessons in school. Meanwhile, adults learned everything the hard way or just never learned at all. There was a study showing teenagers could identify phishing attempts way faster than their parents, just because they had more practice. That neighbor kid probably knows more about URL structure than half the people in Congress. Schools finally realized teaching kids how to avoid getting hacked is more useful than making them memorize state capitals. Kind of embarrassing for us older folks, but at least the next generation won't fall for those fake Amazon delivery texts.