Mastering Digital Parenting: Navigating Cybersecurity and Privacy for Your Family

Okay, unless you want me to pause it and then you can start from your side. Yeah, I'm going to start it here, okay, all right Now, I see that you're recording on your side.

Welcome everybody. Thank you for taking the time out of your day for our lunch and learn on how to learn about how to protect your kids and yourself online. My name is Craig Petronella. I'll be your host today. I'm a licensed digital forensic expert, so I'll give you the lens from what a forensic investigator looks for in investigations of predatory cases, and we'll talk more about that later. I've been doing this for over 22 years with my own private company and I've got a few different websites here Petronella Tech and I've got a few different websites here Petronella Tech, compliance, armor, blockchainsecuritycom, and then a new website we launched called SimpleCyberio. So what you need to know today.

We've got a slide deck here that's got a lot of information packed and we've got a short period of time, so I'll try to go at a cadence that is acceptable. But if somebody thinks that I'm talking too fast or I'm going at a fast pace, just raise your hand or slow me down. Happy to do that. Happy to answer questions at the end as well. So I'll try to adjust it to how you guys are ingesting this information, because it is a bit of a fire hose. So I apologize, but obviously there's threats on social media. There's a lot of government issues happening right now. I don't know if you guys have heard, but Florida, I think, is banned, or at least there was a bill in place. I don't know if it ever got passed, but for social media to be banned, I think it was less than 13 years old. So we're going to talk a little bit about that as well as how to keep yourself and your family safe online, some best practices and how you can teach your kids and educate your kids in this exciting time, because we've also got AI and just a lot of technological things happening things happening.

So number one threat is cyberbullying. So cyberbullying is basically the use of any kind of digital technology. It could be just text messaging, imessage, social media, any kind of online platform. It's been around forever, sadly, but basically it's been around forever sadly, but basically it's the either adversary, cybercriminal or whatever on the other end, just harassing and intimidating. It happens on social media a lot, sadly, especially at a young age. We'll talk more about that as well, with platforms that are chosen nowadays, like Discord and things like that, by cyber predators. You can help your kids by encouraging open communication, trying to allow them to embrace technology in healthy ways with the family so that it's not like in their bedroom, for example. I would recommend something like that oh, looks like we got somebody joining here.

Yeah, I just admitted.

So we're going to teach you a little bit about how to identify if there's a situation and how to block or report cyber bullies or signs that you can look at, or look for Proactive steps to educate and communicate as well. So online predators are individuals who use the internet to exploit and manipulate others, typically targeting children and adolescents for grooming, manipulation and exploitation. Targeting children and adolescents for grooming, manipulation and exploitation. The consequences can be severe, like we talked about, depression, long-lasting psychological impacts, physical, emotional, suicidal tendencies. So protecting your family from these predators requires a proactive approach, with education, such as security awareness, training, communication and monitoring, and we'll talk about different technology tools that you can use in your household as well. So inappropriate content can vary widely, but generally it's not suitable for children. There could be violence, there could be other harmful pictures, words, etc. And kids can stumble upon this content through unintentional means, even YouTube. Youtube has a version for kids, but it's not perfect. It does use AI. It's not policed very well. So I don't recommend just giving a kid a laptop or an iPad, for example, and saying, oh, you could just use YouTube Kids. It's just, it's not perfect enough and there's just been a lot of mistakes. That's just an example. But real life consequences of interacting underscore the importance of supervision and fostering that open communication. This is why I recommend not allowing devices um, unattended or on on quote-unquote, policed, uh or monitored, because you just it's, it just makes it really difficult as a parent.

So I'm sure that most of you are aware of what phishing is, or scams. Phishing is really, um, evolved into what's called smishing. Basically, basically, it's an email that is oftentimes spoofed or faked. It looks like it came from a trusted person or a coworker, but oftentimes it's not. And you can scroll over the email with your mouse if you're on a computer, and oftentimes you'll find that the email address, even though it says or the name says that it's something that might identify with you, oftentimes the email address is different. Or if you look at the links or attachments in the emails, you'll see that if you hover over them they go to websites that you may not be familiar with. So we never recommend opening attachments or clicking on links and emails. But for children that aren't as educated and teens, you know they could easily get tricked. So we always recommend continuous education and even drills and testing, making fun games out of it to make it engaging so that they can learn these tricks Now with cell phones and mobile devices. The smishing attacks I just recommend that kids don't open attachments period, don't click on links period, because it's really. You can't hover over a link on a text message

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And now there's a new exploit in the wild. I don't know if you've heard this on the news yesterday, but there's a nasty what's called a zero day for Apple devices with iMessage. So it's been recommended to disable iMessage for the time being, until Apple addresses a security patch. But there's really bad spyware and groups out there that can now infect a device or a victim's device without even clicking on anything. So you just the nso spyware. Um called pegasus is the most famous one for this where nation states will target journalists, where they can just basically just send this malicious software to the victim. They don't have to open anything and they're compromised unless they have a new feature Apple introduced called lockdown mode or some other enhanced security to protect themselves. But just a regular device will get immediately infected. So it's really easy for kids and children to fall victim to these phishing and smishing. And then scams you know people, scammers will call on the telephone, they'll do social engineering, they'll do impersonations. They'll leverage new technology with AI and deep fake technology, impersonation of voices that might be familiar to them, depending on the level of sophistication of the attack. But you know, we always recommend proactively educating your family, trying to stay ahead of these threats, and I'll give links at the end of the presentation for some good organizations like CISA to follow.

Obviously, you may be aware of overuse, of an addiction to technology. It could range from gaming, social media consumption. Apple introduced a feature called screen time, which is a good barometer, so to speak, of that. You can limit the amount of time that you give your family or your children access, you can schedule a time that the devices are allowed to be used and prohibit certain times of the day, and you can even do this in a business too. Years ago I remember we put in technology called WebSense at the time, and it was internet content filtering and monitoring, and found that, you know, during the lunch hour, for example, it was allowed to, employees were allowed to surf the Internet and basically have freedom, but during the work hours there were some security controls put in place to prohibit access to certain websites and basically it increased productivities. So overuse can lead to health difficulties with mental health, eyestrain, headaches, stress, anxiety and excessive use can really have negative impacts. So internet addiction can result in decreased productivity for academic or job performance and withdrawal symptoms.

I don't know if you've ever given your children an iPad for too long but then you could tell that they just sometimes they get angry. But then you could tell that they just sometimes they get angry. It's like a real thing where there's dopamine that's released in gaming and in certain technology situations. Privacy concerns I'm sure you've seen the long licenses of things that we have to accept when you install an application or piece of software. Oftentimes it's pages long.

But there's concerns for kids and teens online sharing personal information a lot on social media platforms. There's a popular app called Snapchat. I'm sure you've heard of that. That's popular among teens, but a lot of kids they don't realize that the other end of the communication or in this case, if we use Snapchat as an example, they can take screenshots. So just because you're using a platform like Snapchat, that has what's called disappearing messages and the child may think, oh well, this is private, nobody can see this. That's actually not true. And there's also what's called keystroke logging tools and malicious software that could be used, that will circumvent the security of those platforms too.

So, basically, if it's online, it's online forever. So, basically, if it's online, it's online forever, and we need to teach our kids that way. So children they might not really fully understand that there could be such negative impacts from using some of these platforms. So it's important to go back to the education and not teach them to don't use your real name. Try to use an alias when you're online. Don't give out your address or your school that you go to or photos. You want to really try to teach them to be restrictive on any information that they share and don't even post about. Hey, I'm going on vacation or I'm you know. You don't want to invite criminal or just issues from happening that you could be profiled. Privacy settings a lot of the platforms do offer privacy settings where you could control certain restrictions that they can be properly configured. They're not that great and they don't always work all the time, but for what you're given, definitely explore and educate yourselves on the options that you have at your fingertips.

Cybersecurity threats we talked about don't click on suspicious links. But kids they may not know any better and they may click on these links, so we need to teach them to not click on links. I don't even recommend answering the phone live anymore because there's so much AI and scamming going around now and robocalls. So you can certainly filter your phones. So you can certainly filter your phones. There are apps called RoboKiller, there's a RoboKiller app and there's a couple other apps that exist that will help filter your phone calls for you. Malwarebytes makes a really good filtering solution, so those could be options to help with this. You could do it manually, of course, as well, but you don't want to ever click on pop-ups. Oftentimes, pop-ups will lead to malicious websites and that's how you'll get malware and bad stuff on your computer system, like viruses, spyware, etc.

Um, gotta be careful with the the personal information again. You know children may not realize that they're sharing sensitive information home address. Never share passwords, financial details you never want to put your household at risk. They you know kids may also not really understand cybersecurity best practices. Using unique software passwords on different platforms. Don't reuse passwords. Try to use what's called an encrypted password manager. Kids might not realize that it's actually really risky to use the free internet at, like Starbucks, for example. You don't want to do that because there could be somebody on that network that could sniff out passwords that are saved on your computer, like, for example, if your computer checks for new email or something like that. Um, that's how your password can get compromised, so you want to try to use a VPN to protect yourself there.

What was the? Uh, the, the filtering solution that you mentioned for phone calls.

Uh, there's two. There's what's called RoboKiller is one app, and then there's another one called Malwarebytes B-Y-T-E-S. Thank you, thank you, yep. So social media consumption obviously you're aware of Meta, facebook, twitter, linkedin, all these social channels Facebook, twitter, linkedin, all these social channels. They kind of create a culture where kids can almost feel like they can get persuaded in these social platforms and you just got to be really careful with monitoring what they're allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do.

There's a good program called Bark. I think Grace uses Bark for a lot of their management. I like that software because it really can filter and monitor your child, what they're typing, their typing and I'm not saying that you need to completely invade your child's privacy, but you want to try to use something or a platform like Bark that can trigger keywords or things that might look like cyberbullying. Or maybe you have keywords in there where an address or something would put a filter in there and then you'd get a notification to kind of just you know, peek in to see what's going on, to see if this is leading down to something bad happening.

But obviously social media has been under heat recently with Congress, with the impacts on kids' self-esteem and their mental health. So that's why certain states like Florida are introducing those bills to ban it for young children because of the influence that it has. So cyberbullying is probably the number one risk on social media, where you know a lot of predators will hang out there on Facebook, facebook marketplace, try to trick people if they're buying or selling something, and also just kind of trolls that are just looking for to pick a fight and try to, you know, rope people into the conversation and then it just becomes a banter and gets out of control really fast.

Other platforms that are newer that you may not be aware of are called Discord. Discord is an app that was popular with gamers. It does have some good pieces to it and does have some real world function. However, recently cyber criminals have been lurking in the platform of Discord and there was actually a few weeks ago a really disturbing article that was published in the Washington Post about how Discord was the platform chosen by terrorists to persuade young kids into suicide, and it was really really depressing and eye-opening article. That is just it's horrible to do more to educate our kids and and make sure that, um, they're not using platforms like this and getting roped in by somebody that they think could be different. On the other end, um, maybe they think it's a friend, but it's not. Um so obviously privacy concerns that we talked about, negative impacts on their self-esteem, depression, loneliness, etc.

Greg, can I interrupt? This is Lisa McCarthy and I'm sorry. I'm a STEM teacher and these are lots of things that we talk about in seventh grade. And just for any parents out there, about the Discord thing, students are absolutely talking to people they have no idea who they are and when we have that discussion in class it scares me that I mean they are very naive and they really need parent overwatch and supervision, and even not just discord but with other gaming systems where they can chat online in games, these students are telling all kinds of things that they shouldn't be sharing with people that they have no idea who they are. So just, I mean it's not. This is like really serious, and I just want to emphasize how serious that is because I hear it all the time here in the classroom.

Yeah, and you're absolutely correct, and it's not just Discord, it's everything right, but Discord seems to be the platform of choice recently. But you're absolutely right, I don't recommend allowing kids to accept friend requests, even from a game that they just played a Mario Kart with or whatever. If they don't know the person on the other end, there's really no reason to accept a friend request, and so it goes back to business too. There's a lot of laws called KYC or know your customer. But bringing that home with Discord, you shouldn't be talking to somebody that you don't know. We're taught it when we're growing up. You don't talk to strangers, right? So it's no different online.

But I think kids are less strict with it because they don't feel I think they just think that it's harmless. But it actually could lead to persuasion and it could lead to bad things happening, and that's where the trafficking and the profiling and the predatory behaviors can rope them in and that's where it gets really bad. But you're absolutely right, and that's what we need to do as parents to police that and better educate our kids around that. That it's not necessarily that you can't use Discord if there's a legitimate use case for it, but if you can't see or have the capability to monitor your child, then consider using something like Bark or some other type of software like that on the device to help not a substitute, but to help aid the parent in. Hey look, this could be. Here's some keyword triggers that you can, so if you're at work, for example, you can get notices and alerts and things like that. But yeah, it's a bad area right now and that article in Washington Post was terrible. I don't know if you've seen that.

We got a lot of questions coming in the chat and at the end of our presentation I think we're going to reserve some time to kind of, you know, ask you guys and get some some parent feedback about what their biggest concerns are with their children online and maybe even talk about things that you guys are currently doing now and give some some remediation suggestions.

Yep, absolutely, you know. I'll try to pick up the pace a little bit and then have more time for questions we talked about. Obviously, privacy concerns inappropriate content. There's actually devices. There's a gab phone, for example. Gabb I know a lot of. You know young kids and you know young kids and you know tweens or approaching teenage years want a phone. Everybody wants an iPhone or whatever the latest Droid device is, and that's fine. However, if you don't have the monitoring and the knowledge, know-how and education to properly lock down that device, that could be a gateway into some really bad things that could happen.

So the Gab device is actually pretty cool. It's a lockdown Android phone and it does have filtering software that it comes with and it's using really the approach of there used to be in the technical world, the whitelist, blacklist or the allow list, block list. So by default the phone has limited functionality and some kids don't like that because they can't install their favorite app. It has to be approved and there's only a select number of them that are vetted and tested and approved. But that does help the parent though, because if you take and allow only a pro or a block only and allow only a certain list of applications. It makes the parental control and monitoring of the device and your child easier because you have less things to pay attention to and watch, but you still need to watch the apps that are allowed. Um for all of the above that we're talking about, but here with with discord and telegram. Telegram is just another encrypted messaging platform similar to signal um. They're all very similar. It's that, as parents, you need to be aware of these names so that you could see if they're installed on your kid's devices and if they are and they don't have a legitimate purpose, my recommendation would be to remove them. The Gab device actually has some filtering, so if a kid took a nude picture, for example, it would get detected by the AI, immediately blocked and notify the parent. So that's pretty cool. These platforms to either rootkit or get deep access into that device to compromise it and capture sensitive information on it.

We talked a little bit about the Washington Post article where the young kids are and this is still happening. This is why this is really bad and that parents should know about it, because a lot of parents do think that these apps are safe and they do think that a lot of these games are safe and things like that. There's predatory behavior happening and conversations on the game happening that you're not or have no knowledge of that part could lead into bad things. So it's not necessarily so. For example, if your kid's playing Nintendo Mario Kart and they get a friend request and you don't know who that friend is, but they accept it without your permission and now they have a conversation with this other person and this has been going on for months, the predator oftentimes will move the conversation off of that platform in this case, mario Kart to something like Telegram, discord, signal or other more secure method of communication to continue that conversation and then continue to groom them into sometimes self-harm or violent acts. I'm sure you guys are aware of a lot of the TikTok. You know the contests and the things that they do there. They do similar things here on these platforms. So this is where it becomes, where the parents don't have a lot of knowledge of these platforms and sometimes the conversations go unsupervised. So here's where we're going to go more into like tactics and what you can do to keep your family safe on online and on social media.

Obviously, we talked about education, talked about cyberbullying. Leverage the privacy settings you know. Configure them properly, go through them with your children, educate them on what they, what they're allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do, and do spot checks and drills as a parent to kind of just poke and make sure things are okay. Encourage that open communication and talk to them. If you use a filtering system like Bark, that could help with certain keywords that trigger certain conversations that could be had.

So we talked about using free internet. It's not recommended. If you have to use the internet, use your provider, at&t, verizon, directly. If you don't have a data plan that's strong enough for what you're trying to do. And you have to use the Wi-Fi, that's okay, but you need to put a layer of security called a VPN. There are many different kinds of VPNs that you can use personal and business. I know Proton and Nord are some popular ones for personal and then there's different business ones as well. So security training, security awareness training, physically covering cameras on devices that's a real thing. I don't know if you guys are aware, but Zuckerberg he was. This was years ago. Do you remember this, blake, when he had like a? It was either electrical tape or something on top of his camera. Yeah, it was a sticker that was pretty famous.

Yeah, and same thing with, like your iPhones and your other devices too. I mean, there's only so much trust you can place in the vendor. We'll just use Apple as an example. Apple's generally great with security and arguably can be one of the leaders in security for mobile. However, you can't just trust OK, Apple's got everything secure for me and I need to do nothing. There's what's called the shared responsibility model, and while in this case, Apple has provided great security tools for the users, it doesn't mean that Apple's doing everything for you.

As a user of the technology, you need to educate yourself and learn about what options you have and then the pros and cons of it. For example, Apple introduced when journalists were being targeted and continue to be targeted. Apple introduced a feature called lockdown mode, and lockdown mode is a recommended tool that Apple gives you for all Apple users, where you can go in settings and turn it on. However, because it's more secure, some things are no longer going to work, and one of those things are like we talked about earlier. Don't click on links and text messages, for example. Well, if you have lockdown mode enabled, then the links by default, Apple will screen them and they're not clickable anymore. So it's just an extra heightened layer of security and it may not work with your workflow or certain applications that you use. So my recommendation is try it, see how it works for you. If you can handle it, then keep it on. If it doesn't work and you can't function, then turn it off and try to look for alternative security layers that you can introduce.

Whenever you're doing billing or anything sensitive paying taxes online, for example, you never want to click on links in emails, text messages, et cetera, or any of these platforms. You always go directly to the website. So go directly to your bank, go directly to if you're going to the IRS or whatever. Don't click on links from anything anywhere, because oftentimes those links are malicious.

We talked about parental control software that you can use. Two-factor or multi-factor authentication is highly recommended for any platform that supports it and any platform, including Apple, Microsoft, Google. Always back up your data separately. Don't trust those platforms to do that for you. It's typically not included and out of scope. So, for backup of your kids' photos or important information, have a separate backup plan and backup system. Have a separate backup plan and backup system. So some tools that we talked about. In some of these we have affiliated relationships where we've negotiated cheaper prices. So when the presentation's over I'll send the deck over and you can take advantage of that. So Bark we talked about is a really good software solution for mobile devices and computers that really will help parents with the monitoring of their children online.

Opendns FamilyShield is a good network or DNS layer that will help with content filtering, and Quad9 is actually a free solution that's similar. The difference is you can't do any granular control with something like Quad9. You can't say I want to allow or I want to block a particular website. It doesn't work like that. Quad9's free. They have a database. What they say is blocked is blocked, so you could certainly try it. Like I said, it's free, it's worth a database. What they say is blocked is blocked, so you could certainly try it. Like I said, it's free, it's worth a shot. But if you need more granular control, then you consider paying for something like OpenDNS Family Shield, where you do get some granular control.

Custodio is another good filtering solution. Family Link is one provided by Google. There is some software like NetNanny, which is another similar filtering solution. Family Link is one provided by Google. There is some software like NetNanny, which is another similar solution to Bark, and then we talked about Screen Time. So definitely leverage the free resources at your fingertips. Use everything that you can until you hit a point where, if you need granular control, then consider buying a product.

So CESA is a popular. There's FBI, US CERT. Cisa is an organization that puts out some good articles around current scams, threats, security events, so definitely good to follow the CISA website. There are social media and online forums that you can educate yourself on. There are workshops, webinars that you could attend. Stay connected with schools and educators. Utilize the parental control software that we talked about. Have regular meetings to discuss the online safety for your family.

Review the privacy settings there. You know some of these vendors will, with an update, undo certain settings. So you sometimes you have to to go manually back into certain software and like put back on or opt out of certain things, because if you get an update to an app on your phone, for example and previously you changed the privacy to like not allow tracking, for example, GPS tracking If you got an update, sometimes it'll default to turn that back on and you may not realize that. So definitely you want to review your settings at least monthly. Teach your kids critical thinking skills, Lead by example, Start at an early age, Encourage open communication, Set boundaries and limits, Monitor activity, Teach digital literacy and model positive behavior.

So we're in an exciting time now. We're dealing with AI and artificial intelligence. We've got chat, GPT. We've got IoT devices a bazillion devices on your network. Your washer, dryer, your refrigerator Everything wants to connect to the internet. While that could have a purpose, it also gives you, as a parent or a user of that technology, a responsibility. Everything that connects to your network. Now you have to maintain. So it's a choice of do you get positive benefit by connecting it to the network or is there a burden Because certain businesses that we've worked with, they might use a DVR. For example, we found one company. They actually got hacked because they had an old DVR that they were using as a security system on their network. They haven't touched it in 10 or 15 years and it was a cause of an event, a breach. So everything on your network should be monitored. We've got new Apple came out with their Vision Pro, got VR, augmented reality. I mean everything.

We're in such an online world now online gaming, crypto, blockchain. We're in such an online world now online gaming, crypto, blockchain, the AI with deep fakes and misinformation is a big problem where scammers are trying to I'm sure you've heard of this where they'll call and try to get you to say certain words and then they record you and then they put your voice in these AI tools and then create an engine or a model around your voice and then they use that in social engineering tactics for malicious activity. And then the theft of biometric data, facial recognition I'm sure you've seen the 23andMe and Ancestry hacks. You know if you've ever used those things. That information is now out there too. No shortage of our information being out there. Try to stay informed, Proactively measure and protect your children. Let's go into questions all right, everybody.

So we've been keeping up with the chats here. Um, we do have 23 people here, so if everybody unmutes at one time, it might, might not be a fun experience for all. Um, there is an option to raise your hand and if you guys raise your hand, we we can bring you up. You can ask Craig a question directly and we can go from there. So we have Allison.

Hi, thanks for this information. None of my kids have a personal device yet, but what would you recommend of some of those monitoring softwares? Like, let's say, I were to buy an iPad, what? What should I start with in terms of some of those recommendations and monitoring?

Yeah, so I would. I would start with the Bark solution. That'd be a good one to put on there and then create some boundaries and rules around. You know when. When can you use the ipad and and then um go through that with your family. You know what works best for you. As far as you know times that you can monitor activity, I would definitely use one of the filtering like the Quad9 you can try for free or the Cisco Umbrella software for internet monitoring and control web filtering. I think those would be a good start. Thank you, You're welcome be a good start.

Thank you, you're welcome anybody else with questions. There's not too many hands raised. I know this is a lot to take in, so we're trying to make it as digestible as possible. I'm sure there's a lot of questions.

Um, please don't be shy, lisa sorry, I couldn't find my raise your hand, that's okay, no, thank you.

Thank you for uh for coming on so I have a question about the vr headsets. I know um, like the oculus, those sorts of things. They have in the past and may still require social media account connection to use them and track metadata, that sort of thing. Have you seen that actually happening? And then my other question, because we would ideally like to use something like that in the classroom but haven't yet because of those reasons have you seen anything that can be used as a standalone device?

reasons. Have you seen anything that can be used as a standalone device? I think the Apple Vision Pro is probably the closest one to a quote-unquote standalone device. I know it's expensive but it also and it's

Apple-centric. But it's not like requiring a social account like the Oculus you mentioned, and you're absolutely right. You know, if you use the Oculus, for example with meta, then you need to have a social account and then in the terms and conditions of the social account, they're going to want to know the GPS location data when you're using it and basically everything you do on it. It's going to get recorded.

So you've got major privacy issues from that perspective. So my choice or my recommendation would be the Apple that you want your kids to experience. They get it for Christmas and ta-da, they're happy, they're having a good time, and I just think this. Thank you for sharing this information so that parents can understand that there are real risks involved with those sorts of things.

Absolutely, and it's not all negative either. I mean, like if it's policed and done well, it can be done in a safe way. It's just that there's a lot of education and segmentation that has to happen for it to happen safely and by default it's far from safe, and I think that that's the point. The point is that a lot of people adopt technology. It's exciting, it's cool, it's the new thing thing, especially with ai, um. But where there's good things that can happen, there's also it can be used as a tool for bad things to happen.

And you brought up a good point with the. You know the, the social media and the connection for gps data and location data. I think most people don't even realize that when they use an app like facebook, for example, um by default that app. I don't know if you've ever had a conversation and then seen ads that were something similar to the conversation that you're talking to your husband or your wife about. I mean that's pretty creepy in my opinion, but you're signing off on that when you use that app and a lot of people don't realize that off on that when you use that app, and a lot of people don't realize that.

Thank you for that answer. We do have another question here from Mr Michael Marge, please unmute and go ahead.

Hello, thanks for the presentation. Could you talk about hotspots, a little bit Like if you're using your iPhone as a hotspot for remote Wi-Fi. Does that provide a VPN function or are there other, more sophisticated hotspots you'd recommend to provide more of a firewall type function?

So a hotspot. You can turn your phone if you have like an iPhone for example, you can enable what's called a hotspot feature so that other devices can then connect through your phone and get to the internet, for example. So there's that function or feature. And then VPN is a separate layer, a security layer called a virtual private network. And so, for example I think what you're asking is so let's say you have an iPhone and you connect the app on the iPhone. We'll just use an example called ProtonVPN. So let's say the iPhone has an app called ProtonVPN that you've installed, configured, you have an account, you can enable that VPN connect. It'll say connected and show that it's working, and then you can go in settings on that iPhone and turn on the hotspot and then devices that connect to your iPhone or through your iPhone and turn on the hotspot, and then devices that connect to your iPhone or through your iPhone and out to the internet will then have the VPN connection. Does that answer your question or are you asking for different recommendations for hotspots?

That kind of answers my question. What I was asking is how much of a layer of security does a hotspot provide, as opposed to using a public Wi-Fi in a public space, like in a library or a hospital? Oh, I got you Okay, but you kind of answered my question too. You're saying to get a real good layer of protection, you need to link a VPN to your hotspot.

Yeah, so, using the example I gave, with an iPhone, if you have a ProtonVPN, for example, connection and account and you start that up, that gives you the extra security layer and then also encryption, and then you can turn on the hotspot feature so that other devices can connect through your iPhone and get a secure connection, so that other devices can connect through your iPhone and get a secure connection.

That configuration is much, much more secure than free Wi-Fi at Starbucks.

It's way more secure. And the reason why is you are controlling a couple of aspects of security. Number one you're controlling, in this case, the VPN layer. Number two and you're also controlling the additional security layers and configuration of that VPN on your device. Number two you're controlling the password and who can connect to your iPhone device.

So you're controlling all those aspects of security, whereas when you go to Starbucks and you use the free VPN or, I'm sorry, the free Wi-Fi, for example, you don't know who's on that network, because you don't control it. You're joining that network along with 20 or 30 other people, whoever's on that network with you, and you don't know who they are, and you also don't know what tools or security tools that they're running to sniff or capture information, whereas in the first example, with the iPhone, you're controlling that.

So you're preventing something like that from happening.

Okay, thanks a lot, absolutely.

We got one more question here from Jazz. Something I also wanted to add to Craig's statement here is there's tons of free articles out there. I mean we could probably link some, but assuming you guys are all at home and you guys have your children on your home network, there's a lot of great tools out there that you guys can have for parents and hardware, specifically routers, that give you a lot of parental controls. So we can probably put together a few here on our side, but it gives you a little bit more kind of a monitoring approach from your home network. Jazz, go ahead.

Hey Craig, hey Blake, Thank you so much for this, guys, I think that it's really important that we have these conversations and I really appreciate you presenting this today. I do have a question. It's about my own child, my oldest. She is a dancer and she's in the studio pretty late now, especially as she gets older. I've considered getting a phone, not that I've wanted to, but she's going to be 10.

And I've looked at this gap phone a number of times. She had something similar to a gizmo watch that was more for me to keep track of her, and one of her great friends decided to point out that her watch was only given to her to track her and to keep so once she realized that it was no longer her favorite thing to wear. Does this gap phone does that? Does it, does it give anyone the impression that it's anything other than what I'm expecting it to be used for, and does it work like a phone? Does it look like a phone other than the app feature that you were explaining not being able to download certain things? Then the app feature that you were explaining not being able to download certain things, would her friends know?

that this is a Gap phone is my question. I think it depends on the quote unquote friend and how close of a friend they are. I mean. So if you were to look at the phone side by side, no, you cannot tell, because it's a an Android device. It has actually quite a decent camera on it and it has decent functionality as a phone, as a you can read Kindle books on it. I think you can listen to audio books on it. So it has limited functionality above and beyond the phone and the GPS and the tracking capability.

Now, it's not an iPhone, right, you know? So, like if the other friends have an iPhone and they want to do FaceTime, for example, it's not going to work because it's not. That's not what it's for, it's more of a lockdown device. So I think that's another kind of good point, though, that a lot of kids get peer pressure from they don't have the Stanley Water Cup or they don't have the latest and greatest iPhone, and I think that they obviously don't need to have the latest and greatest because, I mean, the latest and greatest iPhone is really expensive and I don't know if you want a 10-year-old to have it. But my point is that, like for my daughter, we chose as a family to get her the gab phone and she she knows that it's not an iPhone and she she's has friends that have iPhones said things that just because she doesn't have an iPhone, for example.

But I do know that she has asked me hey, I want to do a FaceTime with my friend for homework or something.

And I had to tell her, hey, look, you're not going to be able to use FaceTime because FaceTime is an Apple function and unless you have an Apple iPhone or they have an Apple iPhone, then that's that two way connection.

So what we've done as a family is we have an iPad and we have iPhones and if she were to need to do something like that, she could use that separate device. But like for her you know, she's in cheer and dance and other things, much like your daughter we give her the Gab phone in those situations so that we can get a hold of her and we know where she is. And you could also, if you had, if you wanted, an additional quote, unquote tracking. You can use an air tag too, like I've done that, like I'll put an air tag on her bike, for example. And it's not that I don't trust her, it's I don't trust the other people, right Like so. It's just a balance of using and or leveraging technology and and as tools, as parents, and then choosing what, that, what works best for your family okay, I appreciate that correct.

Thank you so much absolutely yeah, beyond having a gap phone only she would, you guys would know as a gap phone as well um, because it's built on samsung and it's using their proprietary operating system. So, yeah, it's built around essentially like hardware that is familiar to children.

So thank you absolutely, and I I would say that the the gab phone version, the latest one that came out, which is I think it's it's the Gab phone three pro, that's the one that we bought for my daughter. I mean, I think it's really good value for what? Uh, oh, it's one 99.

It looks like um still still really good value for what you're getting um in the device. Now my son I, I he's not old enough to have a phone, so we him the watch, which the newest version of the watch is good too. We had the generation before and the frustration for him was that he couldn't text very easily on it. So now they introduced in the newest version voice to text, which was a big help and that kind of solved that problem for him. But you know, like I said, they're tools, right, they're not going to be all the feature rich stuff that you would get in a full fledged phone. However, as a parent, it makes me feel better because I have less things that I have to worry about tracking.

But you could certainly get an iPhone and put Bark on it, and that would be a good solution too. It's just a more expensive option. But if you did something like that, then you can restrict and control what is allowed on the device and even when she uses certain apps, you as a parent could set filters and triggers to know hey look, yeah, you used Discord or we allowed Discord or whatever, but somebody said this and why did that? You know what I mean. Like so you would get it as a parent. Even though that app was approved, you would still get some deeper data and monitoring capability, so that's an option too, if you need the full features.

Okay, thank you so much.

There's a lot of great apps, too, that you can get for that phone. I mean people you know, if their kid is into baseball, I mean they can get ESPN. Or I mean you have Domino's pizza, you can, they can order pizza if you allow them, you know. I mean there's a lot of great applications that and on their, on their website, they do have a pretty like extensive marketplace so you can kind of see, like what type of apps you know your child would have have access to, should you go that route perfect.

Thank you so much again absolutely.

Um, we kind of want to answer. I guess, what did you have five? We have five minutes left, craig, what do you? Yeah, I think we've got five more minutes okay, um, for those last five minutes, let's uh, go ahead and open up the floor and go ahead and see what top concerns do you have as parents in the modern world? Feel free to unmute and jump in crickets. Everybody must be super secure. That's right, ashley, ashley, go ahead.

Yes, I got a question and it's um, it's just a growing thing. So I have a seventh grader and I he recently helped buy himself a used iphone, so we monitor it using screen time and I use an iPad to control it and take a look at it every day and things like that. But I am of the mindset that he's seventh grade. This is just like conversations with his friends are just to me, even though they're through iMessage, I should be able to hear them just like if they were in another room playing. So I tell him I will occasionally read your text messages.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's part of my job to make sure that you're not being exposed to anything you shouldn't be. This isn't like you guys being home alone with a group of boys. I wouldn't probably do that at your age either. So I do come across, though, in these iMessage groups with his friends where some of the other parents don't monitor their kids' conversations and there's been some pushback about like, oh well, that should be private and amongst them, and I don't want to hear what my kid may or may not be saying on these conversations, and I obviously disagree. So I take different steps, but I don't know if there is, I don't know. Is there like support for one thought versus the other or something that I can kind of utilize to help show why I believe that it's not a violation of their privacy, but instead me being a helpful, healthy part of introduction of these sorts of things?

of introduction of these sorts of things. Yeah, it's a good question. I think that it's really what works best for you and your family, right? I don't think there's really. I think what you're doing is fine. I don't see a problem with it.

But as far as unfiltering it, on the other perspective, I think it's just it's too risky. Like you know, having knowing the other side, like seeing what we see and seeing the crime and how kids get lured in through these platforms that seem innocent. That's why we're recommending education and monitoring of some sort. And how far you take it or not take it is really personal preference, like, for example, like with the example with the Gab phone and the iPhone or the iPad. There's no right or wrong way to do it. It's just that if you choose the path of not monitoring and not having and giving I get it the privacy side of it, then if something were to happen, we try to protect our kids, you know, and I think that we want the best for our kids and we want to give, we want to respect their privacy.

But knowing how criminals use these different platforms and how much at risk they are, I mean I'll just give you a different analogy. I mean, I'll just give you a different analogy. It's like if you have a young kid that's maybe nine or 10 years old, would you park far away in a Target parking lot and let them, like you, sit in the car and take a? I'm just a fictitious example. You're on the phone and say, yeah, go go to Target or whatever you know, but then the kid gets snatched by a trafficker. You know they're out in the open, kind of thing. Or do you walk the child into the store and be with them next to them? You know what I mean Like. So there's there's different perspectives and there's different ways to handle that. So I don't know if I'm answering your question or if I'm right. Yeah, no, you definitely are.

I think we're of the same mindset. I just don't know Like there is. So I typically there's one or two families in particular that feel like you know it's an overstep for a 12 year old and I feel like it's not. So I'm just curious, their. Their question to me often is at what point do you stop? And and I guess from my perspective, like I, don't, I, it's still a very private thing. I don't, like you know, make fun of them for the content they're texting back and forth.

I try to just let it, you know, come in one ear and out the other, not really retain it unless it's concerning right, like hey, that photo looks a little suspicious. Or hey, why are you guys doing this? This is probably perceived as bullying to your other friend or things like just to try to help guide and put guardrails up. But I assume at some point you do have to let go of that. Are there any just kind of like? Is there a? I feel like there's a mental preparation that's happening by us helping guide them at a younger age and then at some point you let go of it hoping you guided them. Is there? Yeah, I guess I was just looking for you know, is there kind of an industry standard of like, hey, keep looking for a little while until they're maybe you know X age and then they're mentally capable of?

Yeah, I don't know if there's really a quote unquote industry standard yet because everything is so new and there's just not a lot of frameworks around. But I'll give context to, like the business case. You know, like back in the late 90s in the workforce, the workplace, you know, there was the big big brother effect of employees should be able to do what they want to do on the computers at work. And then there was the fight against the business owners of, well, no, you're on paid work time, you shouldn't be able to do what you want to do on the computers at work. And then there was the fight against the business owners of, well, no, you're on paid work time, you shouldn't be able to do what you want to do, it's our device.

And there's still that balance and argument today, right, like, how much monitoring of employee activity is too much and does it ever stop? And the answer is it depends. And it depends on, like, for you, what works for you, that's great. If, if the argument on the other side is that's invasion of privacy, well, the other argument could be that you're keeping your kid more safe because you're monitoring, your policing and you're educating, whereas the other argument is that they're not they have. I think, in my opinion, they're too young to have the the no restrictions and the training wheels off, so to speak. Right, so you would hope that when they go, they grow up to be 18, that they would have enough knowledge around you know, almost like street smarts for the internet, right, like what they should be doing and what they should not be doing, and then you as a parent would feel more comfortable in that setting.

Now you could take a different approach, which some businesses take this approach to is they take like kind of a monitoring only approach and they don't really tell they might say it in the handbook or something that their activities monitored. And you can use different technologies, like we mentioned bark. But there are other technologies like keystroking, keystroke logging, for example, so you can say, look, you can use this device, you know, but I'm going to allow, as your parent, I'm going to be checking, spot checking, you know, and that's our agreement on. You know, your privacy is your privacy and that's fine. But every now and then I'm going to check and make sure things are okay.

But if you don't, you could choose to not do that, but then the risks, in my opinion, are well, like Blake was saying earlier, you know, or the other person that asked the question around. Not necessarily the kids don't necessarily know the friends on the other end. You know, so you. You could have three months of conversations with bob on the other end and nobody knows who bob is, and then you find out that bob is a predator yeah, that makes sense to me can you go ahead and go back a few more slides and pull up that list of apps that you had?

we had a few few people that wanted to take a few pictures there. Yeah, andy, would you like to come up and ask the question directly? Craig might be able to tackle a little bit more here.

Yeah, I'm displaying my appalling ignorance of devices that are already in our house. Don't be sorry.

You guys are here, you're good parents. You guys are taking a proactive measure. House, don't be sorry. You guys are here, you're good parents. You guys are taking a proactive measure, so don't be sorry.

Yeah, so basically the way we've got our our iOS devices set up is they're all on my wife's account there's three two iPads and an and an iPhone and I didn't even know that this was an option to be able to see, uh, the messages and whatnot, um. So I'd like to split them off so that we don't have to see them all the time, um, but I didn't know if there was a way to do that without losing, you know, the message, history and um, and then to still be able to see what's going on, just like, uh, the lady was talking about earlier, um so I think your question is you're you're you're kind of sharing one account right On the app, okay, so so yeah, if you change it, you would lose the history.

Um, what you might want to consider doing is adding in something like Bark now, and then you have that different control from today forward, for example.

Okay.

Sweet. Something that I also suggest too, that we haven't talked about, is, of course, all of your children most likely have some type of device, whether it's a phone or tablet. You are free to go into those security settings. You know, the big thing that we were talking about in the chat is not necessarily the apps. As long as you're downloading apps from those respective app stores for Apple as the the app store, or, you know, if you're using an Android device as the Google Play store, you know so obviously restricting, and there is a feature that people cannot download apps through third party marketplaces. So essentially you lock that device down to only be able to download apps from the app store.

But then even a step further is how those apps are collecting and accessing that device. So you can see, for example, if you download, for example, duolingo, if your child's learning a second language, you can see that that device will have access to the microphone, obviously ESPN. If your child is the baseball kid super into whatever baseball team, obviously ESPN does not need access to your microphone. So making parental decisions like that it starts there. That's a great place to start. It doesn't take too much time to go through that.

Yeah that's a good point and the same with location data. So GPS location data. You may not want to allow that for certain applications. There's no reason why that the app needs to know where you are or where the device is at all times, for example.

Yeah, especially for app specific, like why would ESPN need to collect your child's location? Right, you know the weather makes more sense, right? And then obviously, be be in mind if you do turn off some of those, uh, those privacy settings, the geolocation settings. You know, if you're using your, your iphone or whatever, uh, as a find, my, to track your, your child's movements, um, you know, obviously, be aware that turning that, that capability off, um, the geolocation settings on the phone, would disable that, at which point you could get some type of air tag or some you know tile or something like that to, you know, put in their backpack. And having the discussion, of course, with your children. You know, obviously I'm not a parent, so I'm only coming here from a cybersecurity perspective, so, but you know, some of you sounds like your children are at the age where you can't have that discussion. Um, you know, obviously, children, you guys do a good job of protecting your children. You know, you guys are here, you guys are proactive, um, you know, but the world is a really scary place, um, and having that discussion and coming from the perspective of hey, this is, you know, not me trying to be a crazy parent, but this is me trying to protect you, which is my job right, my duty as a parent. I'm not sure how that would progress, but it's a great starting place as well, I think.

Michael, would you like to come up again? Michael said my family patiently watched a film titled connected by kurt. Cameron actor, christian activists seemed very useful. Have you seen it? Any comments? I have not, greg. I haven't seen. What is it called? Connected by kurt?

cameron no, I don't think I've seen that one yet I have not okay, I just brought it up.

It's not the newest film, I think it's a few years old and they had some software, seemed like, for younger kids associated with it. I'm not sure how up-to-date the software is now, but they presented some real-life situations, like you mentioned, about kids who'd gotten in trouble from various ages and what to do to protect against it and some of the consequences some of those people suffered. Some of them are several years out from having resolved those problems. It was very impactful. I say patiently because you know kids have the attention span of a fruit fly so unbelievably. They watched it attentively and they're 14 and 19 now. I think we watched a couple years ago. I think it had a little bit of a positive. You know we struggle with this stuff, like I think everybody does, but it had a little bit of an impact because of the real-life scenarios it portrayed.

Yeah, I'll have to check it out.

That's always scary to think about it.

It's really hard for me, you know, obviously, like I said, I don't have any children, but I do have a wife and obviously I'm in the industry the cybersecurity industry.

Obviously, I've been working here for now, I think, four or five years, but I've seen a lot in my time here and, uh, it's definitely opened my eyes as to how you, you, how I use my device, you know how I use my computer, Um, even, of course, my wife, you know how she uses her device. You know, cause a lot of, um, people who aren't aware, just use their device mindlessly, right, you know they're scrolling through Instagram, they're doing this, and so it's opened my eyes a lot. And so, yeah, the fact that you guys are here is awesome, that you guys are actually taking interest in how your children are using their devices, protecting them. You know the intent is there. That's a great motivational perspective here, you know. So you guys are taking interest, you guys care about your children, you guys care how to protect them. You guys realize this is a scary world, so, um, so, yeah, I just wanted to to salute you guys.

Well, awesome. The only thing that we didn't talk about was the Faraday bag. I don't know if you want to maybe talk about that, but a Faraday bag is basically a bag typically made of foil or some type of metal that will foil communication. So like, for example, if you wanted to really make sure that your device is disconnected and not able to be spied on through either a malicious software application or whatever, you can put it in a Faraday bag and, you know, have safety there so that there is a purpose for that.

It's the same for key fobs on your car, you know, to prevent car theft the latest car thefts or with repeater devices hopping off of your. So most people, like at home, you know, before they go to bed they they hang their keys on a hook or something and it's typically pretty close to the vehicle in the driveway. So you know, faraday bag is a great solution to drop your keys and stuff in it at night or whenever you don't want anybody else to have access, to bounce a signal off it. That's another, you know, quick, quick kind of thing. That's a good security practice. But yeah, we're a little over on time. We should probably wrap up.

Yeah, yeah, I was just saying that. If you guys I just want to give you guys one more opportunity. There's been a lot of quiet people out here this presentation will obviously be sent out. It is being recorded so you guys can rewatch it. If there's any questions that you guys have before we we depart, here is your final opportunity.

With. With regard to Faraday bags, how secure are those travel pouches like Eagle Creek or something you buy in Target that says it has RFID blocking? I tried one of those at work scanning my badge through doors at a hospital and it didn't prevent the ID card scanning, but I'm not sure how useful it is otherwise. You have any idea about that?

yeah, there's definitely. You know, with anything else, there's quality levels, so some of them are not effective. Um, they don't have a thick enough wall of of blocking. So, uh, yeah, different quality levels that I you can certainly test them. There's easy ways to test them, but I would invest in one that's a little bit thicker walled.

There's also different frequency bands. So like, for example, RFID like that you would typically see for like a wallet or something like a passport, is typically a lower frequency than than something like maybe your your access pass for, for a door at the hospital or whatever right.

So there's a good chance. It was working for radio frequency, just not for scanning type frequencies.

Yeah, I mean, there's tons of ranges of frequencies that these devices pass, Like ultra high frequency ranges can be from anywhere from 300 to a thousand megahertz versus, you know, a low frequency range would be you know, 400 ish, right, so um and up. So it just depends on on the type of device you're trying to block um and the frequency ranges that it passes. Um, but a lot of times those uh, those badges you know for doors and access points are designed for higher frequency

ranges. So so yeah, okay, thanks a lot, yep well, thank you guys, I appreciate it thank you everybody for attending.

Um, you guys are super, uh, super awesome for attending. Obviously we are at uh, at your service. If there's anything you need from us, let let us know. We are getting ready to launch a new product with SimpleCyber, which is going to be $100 a month per endpoint, per device, which essentially would allow us to put our security software on your device which essentially would stop any type of access intrusion, anything like that. Getting ready to roll out. So, um, stay tuned for that um and we will see you guys on the next one.