How to Ensure Your Child Avoids Online Predators

Although we read about it a lot in the papers and on the TV, the chances of your child being harmed by an adult are very small. However, no parent wants their child to be at risk, so you will no doubt be looking for ways to ensure their safety when they’re online. People who abuse children come from all classes, professions and can be any age or gender. It’s common for victims of abuse to know their abuser – it may be a family friend or a family member. Once they have been abused, they will often be threatened and blackmailed in order to keep their silence. It’s vital that you take action if you think your child or another child is being abused. The NSPCC helpline offers advice for people who are concerned about a child’s welfare, or you can speak to your local police for advice. Abusers often groom the children they abuse, which means getting to know the child and gaining their trust before abusing them – this doesn’t just happen online, but can happen in person as well. Abusers usually put themselves in places or positions where they can be close to children, such as playgrounds or parks where young children play and hang out with friends. This is something to be aware of if your child plays in local areas with their friends.

 

The best thing you can do for your child, first and foremost, is to make them feel loved and valued. Give them the confidence to believe in themselves and their judgement, and educate them on safety and how to act with people they don’t know or may not trust. Be cautious when an adult becomes extremely interested in your child, such as if they’re very keen to babysit them all the time or to take them out on their own. You should also  ensure that your child knows that they can talk openly with you, and that you’ll believe whatever they tell you – children very rarely lie about abuse, so if they flag an issue up to you, you should take it seriously. Give your child a curfew, so that you can know where they are and what time they will be out until. Make sure that your child doesn’t go out alone, and that you pick them up after they’ve been out to meet their friends so that you know that they’ve got home safely. It’s also important that you teach your child that it’s safer to hang out in a large group rather than on their own or with just a couple of people. If they walk or get the bus to school without you,  encourage them to stay in public areas where others can see them, or to walk with friends.

Children use the internet regularly now, but you don’t need to panic and ban your kids from using it out of fear that they’ll talk to strangers. The best way to ensure their safety is to educate them about how to use the internet properly. This means teaching them about the dangers of online grooming, about avoiding social networks and chat rooms where predators groom children, and to monitor the sites that they use. You can use a programme to stop your children accessing porn or chat room sites, to keep them as safe as possible. Discourage your children from posting pictures of themselves online, and if they make a friend online who they later want to meet up with don’t ever let them do so without an adult chaperone.

Categories: abuse, Child, Children, Online, Online privacy, people, Safety

How Can a Penetration Test Protect Your Company from Hacks?

Internet security has been hotly debated throughout the media recently. Anyone and anything connected to the net is under attack. The average person can stop attacks with antivirus programmes, firewalls, spam filters and intrusion – or by avoiding dodgy emails that appear in their inbox, but what about more sophisticated attacks that are becoming increasingly common?

Some attacks look like they come from your colleagues, or quote names, incidents and ID numbers that only insiders at your company would know. Other sophisticated attackers use a known vulnerability in widely used software to grab login IDs and use them to crack open a business network – so how do you guard your corporate wellness against them? Fortunately, there is an antidote; the penetration tester.

John Yeo, European head of Trustwave’s SpiderLabs pen test team, which carries out hundreds of penetration tests every year, explains, ‘They pay us to replicate the same kinds of attacks used by the bad guys, the cyber criminals.’ Companies like Yeo’s try to find ways to penetrate the defences of a company and see if those defences can thwart the most sophisticated attacks. Otherwise known as “white-hat hackers”, these skilled security testers are vital to fight against sophisticated hackers who put more time, resources and technical skill into their approach.

According to Christian Angerbjorn, a former in-house pen tester at one of the UK’s High Street banks and now security head at IF Insurance, banks and other financial institutions are top targets for hacking. ‘The closer you are to cash, the closer you’ll be to getting attacked,’ he commented. ‘The importance lies not in what you are doing but in quantifying the risks you face.’

You might think your money is better spent on security tools and training, but a thorough pen test, Angerbjorn claims, will give you a good sense of what attacks are likely to work and help define the action you need to take to defeat similar attacks. He added that a penetration test is more about the test than it is the penetration. ‘The question is not whether you can get in, usually you can because the more you dig the deeper you get,’ he said. ‘The more important thing is what risks you expose and what damage could that do.’

Categories: hacking, Online privacy, penetration testers