There are Bad Guys Among Us The Human Element

Episode 13: There are Bad Guys Among Us

In the last episode, I teased that I would eventually record a podcast about an incident my own child experienced with a stranger in his text messages. Well, here it is.

While playing a game on his phone he struck up a chat conversation with someone (common with online games). The other person in the conversation convinced him to take the conversation to text message.

And that’s where the problem begins.

This episode is focused on the dangers for our kids on the internet, but it applies to everyone. There are some basic things you can do to protect your family, and yourself.

Transcript

0:00

People are the weakest link in any cybersecurity plan. We’re distracted, exhausted and often unmotivated. It’s time to change the approach used to protect our businesses, technology, identity and data, the human element has to be front and center in a war against data breaches and ransomware attacks, it’s time to educate.

0:52

Welcome to the human element podcast, visit our website at the human element dotnet for more content to help you strengthen your awareness of the people problem in cybersecurity. I am Scott Gombar, owner and Washtech, a client focused, security minded proactive IT service provider. In the last episode I teased about a story I was going to talk about on another episode. This is more along the lines of children using the internet. So not really the focus of the podcast. But nonetheless, I as a father, I believe it’s important to talk about this, I believe it’s important to address this topic. And I think it’s super important that parents understand the risks that are out there. We live in a world today where where sex trafficking is a big problem where kids are targeted all the time. And we’re not paying attention when you’re letting your children sit on internet connected devices all day long. We’re letting them do whatever they want. And we’re not paying attention to what they’re doing. This is dangerous. And you may not want to see it this way. You know, it’s keeping them out of your hair. While you’re trying to do things around the house, you’re trying to work. Whatever the case may be summers, you know, it’s summertime as I record this, so the kids are not in school. And so we tend to say okay, they’re on their, you know, their PlayStations, their iPads, their x boxes, and we’re not paying any of their computers, we’re not paying any attention to what they’re doing. Very dangerous. This is episode 13 of the human element podcast. I am Scott Gombar, your host. And let’s talk about safety for children on the internet. All right, so I’m going to tell you the story of what happened with my son. Fortunately for him, and for everybody else I got involved before it got too far. So used to play doesn’t play it anymore. My kids, you may remember, during COVID, when everybody was locked up among us, became a very popular game really fast. And so it’s a it’s an online game that you could play from your phone or from your iPad or whatever device you might have. Where I think the premise of the game is kind of like there was a board game. I forget what it was called now. But the board game is where you would try to figure out who the bad guy was you would do a murder was committed, you would try to figure out who committed the murder. So it was a board game many many years ago. Today, there is a game there’s probably more than one game like this. But there’s a game called among us, where the goal is to figure out which person is the bad guy. Now I might, I might be butchering the game a little bit. I have never played it. My kids played it for a little while they’ve lost interest in it so they no longer play. Well among us, like many other games has a chat feature.