Raising Our Kids In A Connected World: Michael Spaling

information security team at the UFA which you may know is one of the best research intensive universities within Canada and is a top 100 in the world as well he's a recipient of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee medal for his notable contributions to cyber security industry and he was recognized as a top 10 under 40 by the Canadian Security magazine he's got a handful of published cves to his credit he's braved the world of startups as the chief security officer for an organization that was first to Market offering digitized legal services and he's a co-inventor on a patent pending currently working its way through the US patent and trademark office when he's not working he enjoys

uh spending time with his kids and his wife and the family dog while he's making countless trips to the LEGO store or waiting for it to arrive in the mail everybody please join me in welcoming Michael that was uh that intro was written by Chad GPT I just fed my LinkedIn profile into it and said give me something and kind of what it spit out um well awesome uh before I get into this uh in case you were wondering uh it says kids up there if you don't have kids that's okay uh this talk is rooted about two years ago and um it really should just say a younger generation um I was just lazy to uh go through the

slide deck and and change the tents um one of my grad students Lydia is here I didn't tell her going to put on the spot but about half an hour ago she was like Michael I don't have kids but I'm attending your talk and I was like okay I I taught you well you Rebel good work so don't worry um mess it for next or message for next time um I've noticed some really interesting things obviously I've built a whole career out of cyber security but um one thing that's missing from my intro is um in addition to all that stuff um I'm also an instructor I teach at the UFA so I teach an advanced

network security course in one of our master's programs and uh I've noticed in in recent years um there's been some really what I what I would originally call odd but they become normal interactions between younger Generations coming into University who don't know life without the internet interacting with what I'll say is a much older generation who's been there for some time that that doesn't know much about the internet and when you intersect them things happen that are involving uh the cyber security team um also my my bio is a little old I'm not the manager of information security anymore um I I have a new Ro now principal security architect but uh there you go so before

we get into this uh just some minor housekeeping um I'm a big fan of using actual real scenarios in basically everything I do so there's no hypotheticals not theory none of that stuff today everything I'm going to talk about are real actual things that have happened that um I can vouch for but there are most likely people in this room um even though they've been anonymized who know the finer details of some of the things I'm going to talk about so if you know what I'm talking about please respect the privacy of others it doesn't mean you you whisper to the person next to you yeah that was Bob and accounting ha don't do that and

um I'm pretty sure this is being recorded and we'll probably find it way on YouTube at some point so I have that last one on here there's a very small chance very small chance someone in the audience might be one of the people that was on you know that I'm going to be talking about um if you out yourself that's on you okay so if you stand up and you're like actually Michael this is why I did all that that's on you okay there's there's none of this you know Michael talked publicly about someone he wasn't supposed to this has all been vetted it's just okay um so as I said earlier uh this talk is actually uh it's

one I did a couple years ago um Tess in your talk you made a comment about how there's no trees in Edmonton okay I know where the trees are they're in bamp and I can tell you that because that's where I did this talk okay so uh there was a talk in bamp um about two years ago and this was the theme um of that conference with their logo use with permission is the internet broken and they encourage people to submit talks you know talking about that that from all these various perspectives and uh I jumped on that and was like oh yeah I can talk about that like you know let's look at it from my interactions with

people but but being an instructor teaching grad students um father of three I have three kids they're 12 10 and N um I can speak to it from some of the the the weird Oddities so this talk is rooted um in that uh in that talk about two years ago but it wasn't recorded and I've always wanted to do it again update it a bit to with some new stories and and hopefully record it so that's where we are let's get going so my daughter she's 10 years old this is from 6 years ago um we were having dinner one night and in her high-pitched little squeaky voice she just bit up out one night mommy what did you watch on

Netflix when you were a little girl and you know we all kind of laugh and you how how funny how adorable um to which my wife replied um oh sweetie we didn't have Netflix when I was little and my four-year-old daughter without missing a beat replied with two words just YouTube and yeah something broke in my brain I don't know if it was good or bad um but that this was 6 years ago that is when I realized this interaction of our kids and younger generations with computers and technology is not a future State it's a current state it's happening right here up until that point in time I always thought that yeah you know managing this

is going to be me you know logging onto a firewall putting in application filters and Reporting and boom walk away um no no that doesn't really work with a four-year-old um so I I made a conscience effort to uh to start actually paying attention to this a little bit and um one of the things that that I want to talk about is this fun thing that we've encountered uh just raising kids who do not know life without the internet and and what that means for a cyber security professional and and risk management professionals um one thing I'm going to try to do today I'm not going to try I'm going to try not to use labels you know Millennials

Generation Z Gen X Boomers um at the end of the day we're all people and maybe we have different different you know contexts and and experiences but we're we're just different generations of people with different exper experiences um again you don't have to have kids this this this should resonate uh but I'm going to start with some of our our fun interactions with uh with students to really put this into context I learned something very recently um I met somebody who recently talked to University students and they said this line they said how many of you remember Facebook in its Heyday of like 2008 and no one put up their hand like these students no one put up their hand

and then the speaker was like really like no one no one remembers that and someone said we were like 6 months old and wow you know so this is this is a very important part because we talk about not remembering life without the internet no these are these are kids who don't remember life with with Facebook you know it's not like uh you know I'm 38 so when I think about life without the internet you know it's people who don't know what a floppy disc is and they don't know the dialup tone that's we are so far past that okay now it's it's people who don't remember the Heyday of Facebook um and uh you throw them into a university

where all they know is is internet memes and really fun things uh let's let's get started on some of these how many of you have seen The Princess Bride yeah so how many of you know this to be a fun common internet meme where you know if you're going to introduce yourself you know you don't introduce yourself as render or Michael you uh my name is enigo Montoya you killed my father prepared to die okay so it's a famous line from that movie um around the time that my daughter dropped her uh just YouTube line um life was Grand you know security teams were dealing with with firewall rules and viruses and and education and awareness and we get a

ticket from a Prof and uh what had happened is this professor uh kind of you know picked up on this too he's like you know my my students they want to communicate on the internet so he did some research and he he started uh an internet Forum like just uh uh what was the word I was looking for here um like a message board okay and one of the threads was introduce yourself introduce all the students just come in here intr yourself somebody introduced themselves with that line my name Isle Montoya you killed my father prepared to die and the Prof reported it to us as a death threat and yeah it's a fun reaction some people

go whoa some people start laughing I laughed I'll be honest I mean I took that ticket spread it through so many internal chats and was like what the heck ignore the Unicorn that's falling over um so I called the Prof not sure what to expect and here's the C he was dead serious like he was he was there was no playing around um you know he had learned a lot of this stuff but you know if you see something say something uh and that was him he's like I don't know who this person is I don't you know they're not registered in my course but there's someone giving death threats on my my online Forum please deal with it

and I had to explain to the to the gentleman like oh you know it's a pop culture reference you know and and this is very important we don't treat them as dumb you know it's it's they don't know any better it's it's an opportunity for education and it was just explaining to this Prof like hey thank you there's no risk here I would much rather rather you appre you you report it and be nothing than the opposite maybe tell your students you know please just take this seriously um but uh that was weird for lack of a better term you know that was kind of my my first real interaction with that and honestly I treated it as a

one-off and in the years that would that would come it wasn't a one-off at all it's become kind of common um how many of you know what Discord is how you use Discord if you don't know what Discord is it's just an you know it's an online social platform anyone can spin up a Discord there it's IRC reborn there you go um with teams it's basically all the stuff that we use separated in Services nowadays but students love this stuff okay there are discords for everything everywhere thousands of people in it um where was I going to this one yeah okay so it's insanely popular and students make discords for everything um we had this was right before covid uh we had a

Prof reach out to us asking if we could shut down a Discord server that some of her students created and the answer to that is no we have no jurisdiction over Discord other than perhaps you know impersonation and you know people launching official stuff under the university branding when it's not but in short no if a student decides to spin up a Discord for their class we have no we have no authority over that we don't get involved in it um but uh uh the Professor the reason um she wanted us to shut it down is because she was shocked that her students would use a platform that enabled pedophilia and was made for pedophiles and we were like sorry what

like like that was that was her her her thing right you know please shut this down because discord's a platform for pedophiles I don't understand why my students are using this please do something about it and uh I asked her for you know like like proof of this or just give us some evidence and it turns out like she had no idea what Discord was she had heard that her students were creating a Discord she went online and did some searching for Discord and the reason she found was you know not to politicize this at all very what I'll say you know specific type of website that basically said that it didn't describe Discord as modern IRC or TeamSpeak it

was like no Discord is a platform for pedophiles and that was it that was her that's what she thought it was okay pedophiles why are they using this so I had to again call her up and explain like okay hold on you know with all due respect like sure but you know I had to explain what Discord is and what it was and highlight the fact that sure pedophiles yeah they're in our communities they're in our churches they're in our neighborhoods they're in our schools they're in here they're in there but that's not what Discord is like like it's not doesn't it's not a platform for that type of content anym than any other online platform is right

and um she uh she said thank you you know she was very happy to hear that and the last thing she said she wrote down now now I have to go apologize to my students for going all crazy ant on them and uh I was like okay that that that could have been uh that could have been an interesting one but again we have these these fun intersections of students who who just you know to them it's common normal let's just spin up a Discord let's just introduce ourselves with memes and an older body kind of going oh what's going on here um I uh this this is uh this is a a fun one in

the worst possible way um how many of you back this this happened on Discord uh we had um a male student engage us who just from the get-go uh the word is demanded that's the word demanded that we investigate um the actions of a female student regardless of what we find we find that that female student guilty of whatever his his demands were and then we release the results of that investigation to the male student no no never we're not doing that okay first and foremost yes we can do certain types of investigations but we just don't do them for anybody you know there's processes that that people have to follow to start something protip they

don't typically start with us we're usually in there somewhere they usually start with um like like our our Protective Services our law enforcement our peace officers and uh so so I'm like okay like there's accusations here and whatnot I have no idea what's going on but um we respond and we just say here's the process to get that done right you need to go through our Protective Services Group if if there has been something there has been some type of harassment or abuse or what not fine they're the ones that deal with it they do the risk assessment they will involve us so for interpretation and investigation of the technology components we release the results to

them and the process works its way through and the student said no uhuh then nuh that's bureaucracy I deal with that [ __ ] no do your work um what huh like I'm I'm willing to admit that you know maybe I'm I'm reading this wrong and and driving emotion where there is none or something um but uh they wouldn't go away and we kept saying like you can get help but this is the process and they wouldn't listen uh they started mailbombing us they started spam calling our service desk um and finally just I just said okay fine like I'm not going to investigate this but what are you complaining about like give us some

details and maybe I can bring it to Protective Services to summarize here's what happened on Discord a nonu OFA Discord um M student reaches out to female student through Discord and says hey I have uh tickets to a local do you want to come with me and the female student says no thank you male student says oh okay well um you know if you ever want to hang out just let me know female student says no thank you male student says oh well you know we have this one course together I'm really good at the subject matter if you need a tutor or something I'm here to help and she says no thank you and blocks him and uh turns

out um nothing else happened for like 3 months until one day the male student gets a direct message on Discord from the female student that was very clearly a fishing attack designed to steal his credentials okay um it takes us half a second to look at this and realize her account is compromised that's how these attacks happen they compromise the account they they find all of their contacts they unblock everybody and they just Spam these fishing links um you know hoping that someone will get lucky and they'll click and they'll get more credentials so we explained this to the male student and just say hey you know like the most realistic thing that happened here is this you know she she

was compromised that's why you got the DM she probably doesn't even realize has happened flat out refused to listen to us no way he was insisting his life is at risk his property's at risk is this is at risk that's at risk deal with this she's she's vengeful she's out to get me now and um finally I said okay fine but you have to go through protective services and then he said one of my favorite things you can possibly say to us and that is this Fun Line both of my parents are lawyers do I have to sue you to get you to do your job the reason I love that line is because that's a

threat and now I have no obligations to deal with it and we pass it to the Dina students office because we have one of those at the UA and they have a whole Crisis Intervention team never heard from the guy again and uh yeah you know just just weird and and when some things I kind of skipped over was like it's not a University of Alberta Discord right it was created for like one of the classes but you know same thing oh it's got University logo and branding therefore it's you guys and I was like no it's not um but that's uh that was kind of disturbing to an extent because like this is probably the you

know the the memory that sticks out but but we're dealing with a lot of the stuff more and more um yeah and the reason I have rejected up there is just you know it doesn't handle rejection well how many you guys know twit okay one of the funniest things about twitch if you actually read twitch's branding um I had to read through it to use this this logo they literally State verbatim when you explain our product people probably aren't going to understand it so it's it's if you don't know what it is it's an online platform primarily used to stream video games so you go on your computer you sign in to Twitch you start

playing Counter Strike and people will watch you play Counter Strike um oh my gosh one of the uh fun things that we have just a tip if you're not doing this um the security at the UA we have a whole bunch of like external feelers out there uh that that go off so to speak when they find certain piece of information uh one of them are keyword searches on paste bin and if you search for you know if if people make public posts on pastebin uh that have certain keywords in them um we will get an alert for those and you know we're constantly tweaking them and we got a really interesting alert um it basically said

here's a pace that matches y alberta.ca like at y.ca uh and it was filled with what I can tell you right away is someone's being doxed right it's filled with social media handles it's filled with contact emails it's filled with phone numbers um and and my immediate reaction to that is oh crap our systems are compromised right like that's that's my first thought never mind the person at this point where did they get this information from um so I have I have uh quite a deep bit of visibility into our University people systems uh and the first thing I do is I go look and I check to see is what we have authoritative the same as what's on

here thankfully no what we had and our authoritative systems did not match any of the any of the docs stuff so I'm thinking okay they didn't get information from us um but I I pull up the social media feeds and uh yeah like I don't know if you've ever dealt with someone um very early stages of being doxed um not exactly what I what I thought I would see but uh she had like an Instagram account turns out it was a UA student right she had an Instagram account and somebody had ordered her like 20 pizzas and there was a picture of her standing behind these pizzas with this big you know thing on her face being like Yay

one of my my viewers ordered me pizza and I'm like no I don't think that's a good thing um went and looked at her uh her her twitch feed and this is you know not so much of an of an explicit part of the conversation but I'll say this um she was very well endowed she knew that and that was part of her online brand right and she she intentionally highlighted certain physical assets in order to build out a a commity and this was prevalent in her twitch streams it was prevalent on the Instagram post it was prevalent in Twitter and I'll be honest my immediate reaction was oh damn it like now I got

to deal with like this type of Personality really so called up the phone uh picked up the phone called the number um that we had like that we knew to be sure and you know who picked up her mom picked up and her mom was scared you could hear it in her voice it was just a very timid hello like like you know I think someone had been calling them and whatnot and I explained you know who I was and what I do and then I used her daughter's like real real real full name um and uh she jumps on the phone and again I won't I'll never forget this she was scared she was very

much just like hello you know like like who is this again I explained what I did built some trust and I told her what was happening right you know she never heard of being doxed um told her where the pizzas kind of came from you know why this is happening to you um what you can do about it here's some advice here's how we can help um and she was completely happy very thankful she said she'll she'll go and you know write the report she has to report this to and whatnot and uh the thing that I'm getting at though is two completely separate personalities here right there's this online Persona used to build out a community and then there is

the actual real live human being and because so many people only ever see this they just see what gets posted to social media I think that often times they they forget that there is is an actual real human being over here and sometimes you can do stuff that terrifies them and there's this sort of this disconnect and we're seeing this more and more and more right we're seeing more and more we saw it a lot with covid um with with students who have done an entire three years of high school um four-year degree online because that's how long Co was right or vast majority of it and we're starting to see more and more situations where

students are um you know kind of they're they're not having the personal interaction not having it face to face everything's done through computers and typing and they're losing a lot of that that I don't what the word is just respect for each other and the interesting thing is is when I sit down and I talk to my own students about it um many of them are oblivious to to what it is that I'm talking about what's going on you know and they're often very uh remorseful you know they're very apologetic they didn't mean to come off that way they didn't realize what was happening they didn't realize how they were making other person feel and then

we I can incorporate that into some of my my coursework um but that was uh that was just again odd you know you wouldn't expect a security team to be involved in that but we absolutely are uh I use some AI in this talk as I wanted to so I love spaceships I love aliens I love sci-fi I'm wearing a custom Star Trek theme jacket it's pretty sweet and uh a few years ago someone engages us uh wanting to know why the U OFA is doing uh research on Aliens and I'm like oh I'm biting like what sweet I generally know some of the fun stuff happening here but uh this one you've pequ my interest so I respond and you

know I'm just asking them you know just for the details right you know what faculty what department you know whatever and and uh surprisingly they responded in like 10 minutes and they gave me some names of some some people and whatnot and I'm like they have nothing to do with alien research what the heck um so I go back back and forth and this actually happens for about an afternoon right you kind of going back and forth back and forth back and forth and then in one of their emails um mentioned uh a country a specific country and that's when it all flicked they didn't mean aliens in the context of space aliens they meant aliens in the

context of foreigners from other countries why is the UVA doing research with people from a country that I despise and I reread through the whole email chain from that context someone's like oh crap like just by fluke it it worked it worked for my space aliens awesome and they're being like this guy's going to help us awesome uh and immediately oh crap you know disengage mentioned it to our ceso was like Gordy I kind of screwed up uh you know we don't need this to be an event um but uh oh by the way props that chat GPT for coming up with that I literally just explain the story in like three sentences and that's what it spit out

and I I I just yeah isn't it kind of creepy like this this is me using Ms paint to just cut the image in half so yeah yeah wait to see the next one um but this is something that is actually becoming more frequent and it's new enough that I'll talk about it but not one that I really have solutions for um how I doing time wise okay I got to pick it up a bit so so yeah but I'm also the one before dinner so you know I got to hurry up um all right we're getting there so uh we are getting more and more involved in these this is the part where I can't go into details for anything I'm

not going to risk it but some of the these more political Strife that is happening throughout the world right now we're getting them um I'll talk very briefly about one that happened like a week ago uh email from a random person on campus saying this person is saying things I disagree with it's making the university look bad as per this policy that forbids such things please disable their account what I'm I don't want to turn this into a discussion about Free Speech or hate speech or anything that that is not for us to decide um but uh this was very recent and up until now um there's been a lot of like we have the authority

the expertise to make decisions and can do stuff but some of these types of things we don't and we're intentionally backing away from them um because I don't want to be that person that makes that decision about you know what is what is considered appropriate speech and what isn't and in many cases it's just two people with just differing opinions on something and the one just goes well you know what you're making us look like a fool so I'm going to have the security team turn off your account that'll show them and uh no no so we're this is very early um it's it's with our CIO and she she is currently working on bringing like more of this this risk

stuff to other parts of the organization that deal with like our our risk management strategies letting them know that you know it's not just physical protesters it's not just this it's not just that it's it's hitting all aspects of our life where people are now actually trying to get our security teams to go disable accounts when someone is is in disagreement so um I was on a panel uh earlier on mental health and um I threw this one in chat GPT I tried to get it to show me a fun thing about mental health uh there you go I it's a little creepy but I felt that that that does a really good job of

what I want to transition to here um as the internet you know becomes more popular and politics become more popular and conspiracy theories become more popular don't get me wrong I love me a good conspiracy theory okay I'm not going to you know preach that uh uh humans have never been to the moon or nothing but I don't I don't mind sitting back reading on some of the crazy stuff out there um but uh one of the things that we have dealt with um way more I care to admit is this idea that the government is spying on us and and there are people who I'm going to label it as as paranoia um they have been engaging

us and uh they they insist that the government spying on me the university is entirely compromised it's this big giant conspiracy somehow they've unraveled the whole thing and only they know about it and they bring it to us to deal with and we kind of look at this and it's like like if someone's like hey the university is compromised yeah we'll take it seriously we'll look at it but we've become um I'd say quite good at identifying what has actual legitimacy to it versus what is truly it's a mental health thing just manifesting itself as some type of of paranoia I can deal with this I'm not equipped to deal with this right so again back to our Dina students

and the The Crisis Intervention team um we've been getting to know each other quite well over recent years because um and I'll talk about some of these examples um we had we had a gentleman who insisted that um he was compromised and insisted the government has haed had hacked his laptop and was spying on him and to prove this to us uh he he sent us a bunch of logs that told us very clearly like that's not what any of these logs mean but okay so he wiped his laptop Factory reinstalled with a Microsoft image and then went and downloaded like four or five of those Highly Questionable antivirus scanners you find online scanned they all found

each other and he's like see see see see fresh install all these security products are lighting up I'm hacked and I'm like oh my gosh how do you explain this um and we basically you know said this is not a cyber security thing you know here's here's the the missteps and logic there you know go away uh and he went away he went away for a few weeks until I get an email from a completely valid legitimate cyber security company who we all know I'm not going to say their name uh they know me kind of saying hey Michael we have a reach out from someone at the University um they claim that you guys have been thoroughly

compromised but they can't say how much they've engaged us and they want to use our incident response services and perhaps buy some of our products when can we start this engagement and I was like what huh so like forward me everything you have so I'm looking at the communications and sure enough it was the same individual who was like Hey you know I'm hacked and and and all this stuff so I had to reply and be like sorry you know like uh this person does not represent the business interest of the University nothing's going on here this is a mental health thing we're passing this off to Dena students um and they I love their

response no offense to the vendors but I love their response their response was literally um okay understandable but now that I have your attention any any any any interest in further discussion and I was like respectfully no I I I have other stuff to deal with but I love the uh I under I get it I would do the same thing in your role um but unfortunately uh these are not one and done um I can't give names I can't give details there's probably five or six other things I could bring up from this one individual uh that spans over a year and this is a whole other conversation that I don't have much much advice on

other than observing that it's out there but um there are so few supports for people who are genuinely suffering from some type of psychosis or paranoia and they are constantly engaging us and we're constantly trying to get them help and support that is outside the Realms of of technical support that we can provide um and it doesn't seem to really go anywhere um one thing also another thing that happened too is uh we also we got a random vulnerability scan from some random Company online you know that's we have 130,000 public IPS and they scan like 10 of them and they found a system that responded on on 443 that's uh https and they were like you guys

have no firewall because the system responded on TLS ha we were like we have like a 100 plus Fireballs what are you talking about the system's exposed to be exposed to the public um so we started kind of looking down down that that organization and we found ways to tie it into that individual who had still been engaging us months prior and they were still going down this path of there's something right or something wrong at the University and uh it's it's interesting because like like sometimes people will do that but they'll do it rightfully so and it's just a matter of getting a hold of someone who has the expertise in a certain area such as

myself to actually validate what they're saying but that's not one of these cases so now that we're all crazy depressed um we've got a few minutes I do love Lego if you in the mental health topic you learn that um this is the nice happy slide to get us all into into a better a better State uh Lego Movie 2 there is a really good s great song in there where they say everything's not awesome but that doesn't mean that it's hopeless and Bleak so this is the part where I'm going to transition briefly into uh what can we actually do about this so number one um try to be active active ly involved in in our kids lives I'm going

to transition a little bit more into my my personal life with with my my own kids here um be actively involved in their digital lives um one of the common questions that I get from parents is you know Michael how do I control my kids access to the internet and my answer is from where like you can put every restriction you want at home but they're just going to go to like like Bobby the neighbor's house or they're going to go to school they're going to the library like like I'm I'm a much bigger proponent of being involved in their life and and context and showing them what you know beside them don't don't try to stop them from doing stuff I have

this conversation people all the time they're like should I should I block this or block that I'm like sure in your own house but they're still going to be exposed to it at some point over here so I'm not saying don't don't expose them but be there with them when they're present um it also doesn't mean friend them on Facebook or sorry Instagram Facebook's not cool anymore um you know it doesn't mean that you have to go in there and like their statuses and anything like that but just be aware of what services they use um what else do they have here um if they play games like my kids half the games that I play

I play because my kids learn about them at school it's the only reason I play Minecraft okay we have we have a we have a couple Minecraft servers um creative one and survival one and they're 5 years old and if you want to see what what three kids and their dad can build out over uh Minecraft servers that are five years behind them it's insane but I never would have got into it if the kids didn't come home one day and be like can we play Minecraft I'd be like sure okay I mean I know what it is but uh things like that so just be involved um when my kids say Daddy what are you doing and I

say I'm upgr in my computer and they say can you can I help I go with absolutely I mean now you're not going to put the $2,000 video card in but you can screw the fan in and they're they're they're quite happy with that um they like going to Memory Express I'm like the happiest dad on the planet yeah oh my gosh like where you going Memory Express like Memory Express don't tell your mother um but just be open and honest um another one this one this is all man I love this pay attention to what they say be inquisitive not dismissive this is being recorded it's going to end up on YouTube someone's going to watch this and I

don't want to say their Nam I'm not going to but there is uh someone in my kid's um Family Life who when my oldest says something like hey you know I I totally did this thing in Minecraft and I built this and I built that do you want to see it the person who replies with oh I don't even know what that means go go play downstairs and let the adults talk that is so insanely dismissive to that child because that child has learned about something really interesting they want they want to come to you they want you to see it the answer is absolutely I have no freaking clue what that means come show me right

and then the years go by and they question you know why do the kids not want to interact with me anymore it's like well think about that but pay attention to what they say and be inquisitive um daily commentary from my kids actual stuff that they have said we won't go through all of these it's only hacking if you change something I'm not quite sure where they got that from but here we are um I saw something funny on YouTube today okay that is crazy if if you're not from Canada um our money is very shiny and bright and colorful right um they showed me a video that they found with their friends this is the

video I'm not I'm not kidding you um it's it's like a GoPro mounted on some dude's dude's head and it's it's this and and he's walking around a music conference and he's tapping people on the shoulder and he's offering them something and they open their hands and he drops a condom into their hands and in like like a a square fancy purple rapper and and then he's recording their reactions which are usually you know negative and dis just my kids have no idea what a condom is you know what they thought that was they thought it was a $50 bill and and they were like why doesn't anybody want the money I would totally take that right

and like that's the kind of stuff that someone was showing them at school which they thought was hilarious so they brought it home and we found the video on YouTube and I was like oh my gosh um don't tell your mother right uh fly that you guys for big chungus okay so you know the term big chungus okay it's just a comically oversized um who's the rabbit Bugs Bunny okay so we're playing Warcraft 3 fun video game and and part of this this game uh you can get a big giant dragon if he have enough money my youngest saved enough money and bought the dragon right as me and my oldest were were fighting some some enemy computers and

my oldest says fly that big chungus over here I was like where did you hear that and he's like I made it up no you didn't you know so so so you know you're not in trouble it's just um one of the things that we've learned is that my my oldest uh a lot of his friends are the youngest so even though he's now in grade well this happened when he was in grade five um you know his friends they were the youngest who had had teenage teenagers and and young adult siblings so this is happening now we're seeing this right someone who's 19 years old will make a comment to the 17-year-old which will

get overheard by the 12-year-old which comes to school to the oldest 12-year-old which comes to the six-year-old and I hear it right um haha that guy got yeed okay yeah cool um we can skip some of the Oh Daddy I searched you on Google today I was not expecting that one I was like what did you find and they said a bunch of computer stuff we don't understand and I was like did you watch any of it no I was I was actually like like I don't know for some reason I was like yeah they probably showed all Daddy's YouTube videos on his talks at that school and realized no that's not all what they yeah one day they've met you

and don't worry don't worry um but some of these fun ones though stop trying to see my password they they will I've taught them password security at the youngest age okay they will not share their passwords with anybody um uh in the bottom right there daddy she didn't lock her computer my kids tell on each other when they don't lock their computers okay if you haven't seen our basement you've got my computer here and I can just look over and I can see they have three gaming computers I built for them I've taught them the importance of locking their computers I will call them back in off the trampoline to lock their computers um and just simple basic

things um this other one here I just started a game can I finish okay um I was like a teenager when World of Warcraft came out I know what it's like to have my parents say just pause it and then not understand you can't pause a game that 10,000 other people are playing at the same time um so what I've done with my kids is uh a lot of modern video games now they penalize leaving right if you're going to play a game you're going to commit to that game and you're going to you're committing to you know 20 30 40 50 minutes and if you leave early you get penalized um I've told my kids now like dinner is at 5:00

every day you know that you know how long it takes to start a game okay I have had to say to my 12-year-olds the following words I don't care if you get put in lever's queue you're eating dinner with us and then i' I've you know pulled the plug on on the other net cord and he goes into lever's queue and you know that's been being penalized um but but I can I can emphasize with that right I I can at least give them some guidance and say you know how long a game takes 15 20 minutes you can do math by the way if you want to teach your kids how to do math on a clock this is

how you do it they will learn very quickly when incentivized like that um anyways uh last one I got here another one guidance not control I heard the statement and I love it today's technology is the worst version that younger Generations are going to use right many of us are older we're sitting here going oh this AI thing is crazy these new video games are crazy this is crazy you know R tracing is crazy my youngest is nine man he's going to look back at this in 30 years and be like I can't believe we use that janky garbage like we all do it in our retro perspective right so I'm I'm of the opinion that um I don't try to control

what they do I just try to provide some guidance and be there with them and build out that trust um why are we restricting it right one of the things that I've been looking for and and I'll throw it out to the audience to maybe help with this if I say the words look both ways before you cross the street every single person in this room knows what that means right we don't have to go into the context of of streets and cars and getting hit and running over but if you were to say that to someone in the 1800s they're going to look at and be like the hell's a street you know not not literally but but but the idea

is not there I went down I went down some research to make sure I could confidently state that that um but the whole point is is cyber security we don't really have that you know we don't seem to have this one nice catchall command or or phrase that we can just say to somebody um that that allows them to you know I get what you're saying we don't have an equivalent I've been searching for one maybe we're just too young of an industry to find it yet um but again guidance not control last and then we're done here um it is perfectly fine to have younger Generations um does anybody know what what is a skidi toilet

skidi toilet skibby toilet I don't know what yeah I'm stopping because I don't know what the hell it is and I wish I didn't after my kid showed me just Google it later this is one of the most fascinating things is the only reason I know what the cool lingo is in schools nowadays is because my kids bring it home and um just let them teach you like what is that what you hear about it where's it from um they learn about stuff and uh I I have a story but I'll cut it short because we got a few minutes left here but um uh yeah I'll leave it at that reverse mentoring it's okay to let a younger generation tell us

I've learned more about video game exploits from my 12-year-old than I ever thought I was going to ever learn and that's a whole other whole other story he's not hacking online don't worry it's a different type of expectation um but yeah so back to this is the internet broken I don't know maybe maybe not um you know from my perspective it's absolutely enabled some really really neat interesting things it's enabled some really terrible dark consequential things um but I am optimistic uh I think with with these younger Generations coming on board if we sit down and we listen we learn we teach them they're they're willing to listen as well so that's it there's my references so

people don't sue me and uh here's a uh thank you uh you got two minutes any questions I wasn't sure how that fit into a cyber security confence so it kind of you know winged it yeah render I've

number I've dealt with a number of cases of people whose paranoia has gotten the best of them they insist something is happening that very clearly is not uh how much are you finding that it's because people don't understand the technology they're using it's this magic box that oh yeah stuff goes in things come out and they they draw from that conclusions that are completely wacko it's I don't so I don't think it's any one thing I think it's it's a combination of multiple things that that may or may not be be specific to any one person um to your comments there uh with a younger generation one thing that I have learned is is many of

them know how to use technology but they don't know how it works right someone can take a photo of something they can put a filter on it uploaded to Instagram and and suddenly be depressed but as soon as you say C and backslash program files you get the stare of like the what you're talking about right so I think yeah I think part of that is there there is part of it um I also I mean this is more the political side but I I have also learned that um uh I hate doing this but sometimes if I if I I don't know what's the term grandstand credential dump explain my professional expertise people are willing to listen

to an expert in a certain area and and and you know with a very reasonable um unbiased non-confrontational non-judgmental view they will slowly uh learn differently um but also a lot of it is tied into I think reinforcement right as one thing we have learned is that the people that are are saying oh I'm being hacked by the government they're not alone in that right they're they're online in forums they're online with other people they're part of communities that also believe that um one of the it's it's such a funny statement um but one of the things I read was uh there there are communities out there that pretend stupid things exists okay there's a community on

Reddit called Birds aren't real it's it's it's a joke Community okay it's not actually to be taken literally but it's just a joke community that that claims that birds are not real they're robotic government spice um but there are people who find this community who then believe it's real and and the phrase that I learned it was it was like the problem with pretending to be idiots is that eventually you'll be surrounded by actual idiots who think they're in Good Company um and that's always stuck in the back of my head so part of it is is also you know who are you talking to who are you listening to what is the source of authority here um yeah

yeah purple shirt you uh you said your children are 9 10 and 12 have you how they are they on social media and have you had to have the talk with them yet uh no cell phones no social media um we did buy like a family phone not not like the plug-in phone that's it's just an iPhone um just so they can communicate with my wife and I throughout the day um but no no social media yet but it is absolutely like a request um my my daughter asked if she can play Among Us and I said no just because it's a game that that's first off there's a lot of unneeded interaction with with random people I

don't want you to have at your age and it's a game that teaches deception and that's not really something I want you to experience now anyways um but no they you know what they love they love YouTube like they don't have Instagram they don't have Facebook but at this age they're already talking about YouTube channels and if I sit there and listen in the kitchen you know while they're on trampoline they're talking to each other about uh you know oh when I when I turn 13 because that's what the Ula says um you know I'm going to start a YouTube channel and then it's going to have this and that and then they will come inside

they will grab the cell phone they'll hit video and they'll watch each other like just do flips on the trampoline because my daughter's moment in time thing will be I'm going to have a trampoline flipping Channel um but yeah YouTube huge huge um the other thing that I've noticed since I have the attention um you can ask them uh who's your favorite YouTuber they'll probably have one like they will say like Mr Beast or something like that they don't have favorite celebrities they don't have favorite play they have favorite YouTubers now so yeah I mean I'm I'm not going to judge it publicly but I'm going to sit there and be interested in it on

the side so I don't that answers your question but YouTube yes the rest no just curious yeah thanks yeah no problem yeah yeah it's so it's it's a red it's literally a red iPhone se2 it's red intentionally for when they drop it it's way easier to find on the ground than a black one um it just stays plugged in with their Chromebooks and they're they're not allowed to use it like unless we're out of the house you know so they know and like when my wife and I go for a walk it's actually the funniest thing cuz we'll get text that it's just remember it's one phone but there's three kids fighting over it you know so

it'll be like I was called a dumb dumb I didn't say that yes you did say that I did not call you a dumb Dum yeah cuz you're a dumb Dum and my wife will be like leave us alone like like let us go for a walk yeah but that's all it is you know and like the oldest so he's 12 he's got a lot more freedom the other two um if he's going somewhere like a school event like we'll give him the phone you know just take it put in your pocket you know just it's just a a method to communicate with us but it's logged down they can't install apps they have no games on it um

things like that so yeah I was just going to ask about that like I've been kind of thinking about these things and I'm like I kind of agree with that policy like I don't know if kids exactly should have phones at a young age yeah and something that I was reading like as a counterargument is what about the fact that a kid will be isolated if they don't have access to social media they don't have access to their own phone like what's your Sarah blunt the first thing that went through my head was my kid says the word big chungus he's isolated already so I mean not follow me for yeah unorthodox parenting tips um if my kids

are up here in in 10 years doing cyber security talks I I've been a successful parent um I that's a good that's a good point um yeah so for me this is strictly Michael the parent speaking um I couldn't care less about you know things like that um I grew up in a family where like my friends would have shoes that were more expensive than my entire outfit you know so part of it is is teaching our kids um be nice be kind um respect diversity uh whether that that's everything from from the food you eat the songs you sing the language you speak what your body looks like um and try not to get caught up in you know be

happy with what you have right one of my favorite stats that I give back to my kids is the fact that you live in North America you're already in the top like like 10% of wealthy people on the planet right and we often try to get I was born in Africa by the way I have a whole whole history with a family that does a lot of support in um Africa so that's kind of I'm skipping over some some stuff but it's taught me a lot um growing up which I now uh reflect on my kids right is if somebody were to say you know well Bob has a phone do you have a bob doesn't have a $1,200 gaming

computer not that you know it's my it's my old one I thought I would bought that you know but it's just some of those perspectives right you know we yeah sure they probably have a better phone this family's better off um one of the ways that I've really learned this our kids they always ask random questions they said are we rich they just came home one day said are we rich and I was like what do mean I rich like do we have a lot of money I was like so mommy and daddy have enough money not to worry about money but we still have to make decisions about how we spend it you know we're not

like that family over there that goes to Europe every other month and has like a yacht and a helicopter but we're also not really struggling either right so I don't know if I'm answering your question but kind of the root of it is you know keeping up with the Joneses and if they have it they don't have it I'm trying my best at this young age to instill in them you know what is it the obsessive compulsive disorder has been renamed obsessive comparison disorder just stop stop comparing yourself to others and be happy with what you have and I'll try my best to provide that at the expense of talking about them at conferences yeah I got emotional at the end there

wow okay um good all right I'm sticking around for the VIP talk so for dinner so I'll be here