National approach to cyber security education needed as attacks will only get worse: Teacher

Timothy King remembers getting a spam email to his work account that appeared to be from his school board's IT department asking for his login information.

Being a teacher at Centre Wellington District High School in Fergus who has led cyber security teams to national competitions, King knew the email wasn't legit immediately.

In fact, he went on a hunt online and within an hour found the server in South Korea where the email had originated.

He was able to find the database on the server where 17 board employees had already handed over their login credentials after receiving the fake email.

King said the best thing people can do when asked for information like that is "just stop."

"Be suspicious. Never assume that the thing that came out of nowhere that you're not expecting is in any way real," King said.

The situation, though, highlights just how desperately everyone needs to educate themselves about cyber security, King said. He's taken time away from teaching for the past year to be the education co-ordinator for the Information and Communications Technology Council, a national non-profit that does research, provides policy advice and helps people and businesses learn about technology.

Start education from ground up

The biggest challenge he's heard from educators across the country is that people are afraid of the subject. They don't understand the technology, so when they're faced with talking about how to address a hacker, people stop listening because they get confused, he said.

"To generate the understanding we need around this, I think it goes back to media literacy. If you look at it from digital media literacy, we just started from the ground up with that, that would be a great place to start and eventually you could get to cyber security," he said.

IT, or information technology, "underlies everything," he added.

"It's our critical infrastructure, it's our supply chains, everything depends on it now yet almost no one knows anything about it," he said.

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There are programs being run in pockets around the country that if they were put together, would create a curriculum to help people of all ages understand what their role is in cyber security.

Cyber security awareness month

Ontario is marking October as cyber security awareness month and launched a K-12 Zone to help teach students about cyber security.

Todd McCarthy, Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery, said in a media release that because the province is "a global leader in the digital space, Ontario is always working to strengthen our cyber security practices and protect the data entrusted to us by our people and businesses."

The K-12 Zone has games, articles, and videos "designed to help our future generations stay protected as they grow up in our ever-evolving digital world," McCarthy said.

King has been on the website and calls it a good start, but says much more can and should be done.

"If we're talking about it that's already a win but I'd also argue that maybe cartoons — which is generally how they're coming at it and I get the elementary approach — but this is a population-wide issue. We need everybody from seniors to kindergarteners to just be conscious of this so that when we're all online, we're all a little more aware of what could go wrong," King said.

"Desperately short of people in this field'

He said one message he'd like to get out to young people is that Canada is "desperately short of people in this field" and because cyber threats are only going to continue, it's a good career move. Getting involved in a school's cyber security team, like the ones that compete at Cyber Titan competitions, is a good way to demystify the notion that the work is hard.

King says Hollywood movies have made everyone believe hackers are geniuses who can crack difficult codes. That's not the case, he says, and students who have joined his cyber security teams have been surprised to realize it's easier than they thought.

He said he also hopes that everyone can take on some responsibility for their actions when it comes to being online, rather than assuming someone else will make sure they're safe.

He said it's like driving. If everyone got into their cars and did whatever they wanted on the roads "it would be chaos." But people know they have to follow certain rules so everyone can use the roads.

"Cyber is exactly the same way — if you're going to be online, you need to take that responsibility. It's not somebody else's job," he said.