LRC students learn lesson in cybersecurity ‘hygiene’

Students in Patrick Perez’s STEM-related classes learned all about hygiene recently from two University of Tulsa instructors.

Tenille Smith and Tywania Griffin, from the Oklahoma Cyber Innovation Institute in Tulsa, spent three days teaching students at Lawton Public Schools Life Ready Center about some of the dangers posed by cybersecurity threats. Students also learned how to write block code as they made their own encoded pagers.

But before the real fun began, Smith and Griffin tried to impress upon students the threat that cybersecurity breaches can cause.

“Cybersecurity touches everyone in here,” Griffin told the students. “People are trying to get your information.”

Smith and Griffin shared some of the ways hackers attempt to gather personal information.

One of the most popular ways is through voice recordings over the phone. Once hackers obtain the recording, they use it to create a “deep fake”, Griffin said. Griffin said callers want to try to get those who answer the phone to say “yes”, but sometimes a simple recording of their voice will suffice.

Her advice to thwart this scam?

“If you don’t recognize the number, just listen at first,” she said. She said don’t be in a hurry to give your name or even to say anything.

Smith gave the example of two sets of grandparents of a teen she knows — one set lives in the United State and one in Paraguay — who got scammed by hackers posing as their grandson who said he was in trouble and needed money. She said the teen has virtually no social media presence, yet hackers had recordings of his voice. Smith said hackers may have used his XBox account, not a cellphone, to hack him.

Griffin said scam centers, much like call centers, are popping up all over the nation. Their one goal is to call people and hack their accounts.

She said people need to be careful if they receive an unfamiliar link in an email. She cited the scam of hackers claiming to be from FedX, UPS or other delivery services asking email recipients to click on a link to verify their identity so their package can be delivered. She described these as phishing scams.

“If you receive an email from a company that wants you to verify information, always check the email links. They usually will have grammatical mistakes in the email,” she said.

She said one way to get around the scam is to go to the company’s website without using the link in the email.

Smith reminded students that our world today operates digitally. In the past, people communicated through written notes; now it’s through digital notes.

“People read through it and you have no idea,” she said.

The two women offered other hygiene advice to keep your digital footprint clean:

·Conduct yourself responsibly online

· Make sure your passwords are secure

·Don’t click on unknown links

·Don’t use the same password and username for all your accounts

Students were then tasked with coding and building their own encoded pagers, which they used to communicate with one another nonverbally. On the last day, Smith and Griffin explored career opportunities in cybersecurity.