Episode: 3623
Title: HPR3623: Internet Security - Child Edition
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3623/hpr3623.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:21:16

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,623 for Wednesday 22 June 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Internet Security Child Edition.
It is part of the series' privacy and security.
It is hosted by Lurking Priet and is about 41 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is I have a discussion about Internet Security with our Brady Frost along with
our sons.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world.
Welcome to another episode of the Stuff Evil Steve doesn't want you to know.
I'm your host, Lurking Prion.
Here to guide you through the wonderful fun world of Internet Security.
So sit back and get ready to wear, I don't know what we're going to do, hey, stand by,
it'll be fun.
Welcome to another episode.
I'm Robert Campbell.
I'm joined here today by my son, Isaac, say hi, and of course we have Brady and go
ahead and do the introductions on your side.
Yeah, this is Brady Frost and my son, Devlin, is with us today.
Hello.
Hey, welcome.
So y'all may be wondering why we have our kids on the show today.
Well, this is an information security podcast, as we said, this is for regular people.
So who's more regular than our kids?
We're going to go ahead, I'm just going to kind of throw out some questions here and just
kind of get an idea.
So we'll start on your end, Brady.
I just want to have your son just kind of give us an idea of what it means to use the
Internet safely, kind of in his own words.
Go ahead, Devlin.
So, basically, you don't tell your parents to say anyone, keep your identity safe, don't
share anything that's not debris, it's to put it on your own there, and yeah, okay.
Hello, you, Isaac.
Basically, anything that reveals your location, keep a secret, don't tell anyone, anything
that reveals your identity, really just anything private, just do not get that out, I'll
see you out some problems.
So, there we go, what are your thoughts on that, Brady?
I think, you know, and I'll just say that they did not prompt Devlin at all for this
discussion, and I was pretty impressed with what he said.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, Isaac has a leg up because it has household, there's somebody who streams video game stuff
and they have people that don't like them, and they have been swatted in the past, so there's
a little bit of op-sec there when it comes to doing things online, so he's got a little
bit of a leg up there, but again, yeah, no prompting over here, just straight up, that's
good.
I don't want to be telling people where we live.
We don't want to let people know where we're going.
This one of the biggest problems I see is people make posts on social media, they're checking
in in places.
Great, you just checked it at the airport.
Now everybody knows that you're not home, or going to be home for a while.
Why can't you check in like after you're done, like, hey, I went out to dinner or hey,
I just got back from a trip to Africa.
Why are you telling people as you're going?
Oh, great, this person is not going to be in the country for two weeks.
Let's go have some fun with their house.
Kids, posting pictures.
By default, what's included in any picture that you take with any mobile device?
Do you know?
I don't need to say anything on your side, Brady?
Information.
What kind of information?
Just stuff like if you're in your house, then you could be showing someone something that
you're not supposed to.
If you're outside, I have a certain place, then people know where you are.
How would, all right.
So from locations of the picture, but every picture by default has your GPS coordinates
on the picture.
It's part of the metadata.
Anybody can look at that.
You can download the picture and look at the information and you can get the exact GPS
coordinates of where that picture was taken.
So if you think about it, we have kids that are posting pictures of themselves at school
with exact GPS coordinates, taking pictures from home with exact GPS coordinates, going
out to places with exact GPS coordinates.
It's kind of crazy, isn't it?
Did you know there's predators out there that like literally have maps of children?
Literally maps.
I mean, if somebody wants like a blonde hair blue eye girl that's 11 years old and doesn't
weigh more than 105 pounds, it's just a simple matter of looking through their database
and then coming through.
They've got access to all their social media.
So it's just a matter of, hey, look, here's someone who's sneaking out for a party tonight
and guess who's not coming home.
And you know, it's kind of a dark topic, but the U.S. is actually one of the biggest
countries on earth for slave trade, kind of ironic, isn't it?
The bastion of freedom and we are one of the biggest countries on the planet that engages
in human slave trade.
Not that we do it as a country, but that could.
Yeah.
So that brings up the next question is, do either of you guys worry about who you talk
to on the internet?
Definitely.
Well, we elaborate on that.
Like, if I'm talking to somebody, I really make sure that I do not leak any information
whatsoever.
Doesn't matter if they're like a friend or it's like an online friend or just a complete
stranger.
I'm not going to leak anything.
Yeah, you could be friends with an adult who may want to do not great.
Things.
So, you really have to be careful and not really let anything slip.
Yeah, it's really easy to pretend to be something you're not on the internet.
And you really, unless you actually know the person in real life on the other end, there's
assumptions being made as to who that entity on the other, that's even assuming that what
you're talking to is actually a person and not even a bot.
So, it's kind of crazy.
So, yeah, talking to people online definitely want to keep your guard up when it comes to
that.
You guys, we've kind of beat this one up a little bit.
Let's go ahead and find something else.
When you're playing games on the internet, what kind of games do you like to play?
Whether it's on your phone, your tablet, computer, it doesn't matter what kind of games do
you like to play?
Mostly online combat games.
Okay.
First person shooter.
Well, first person shooter is on.
I like to play Earth Thunder, also like survival games.
Okay.
How about over there?
I mainly just play games on apps that I can trust because there's many games out there
that can end up taking information.
Yes, there are a, well, pretty much everything is taking your information.
It's just a matter of how much information they're taking and what they're doing with
it.
So that's a problem, but one of the bigger problems is free games.
You know, those free game sites that you can go to, those things are littered with
malware.
Yeah.
I mean, just absolutely malware heaven.
If you go and you play some kind of a free game on the internet, you, you can pretty
much be sure that your computer just got something.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Now, do you guys have like your own account that your parents set up for you on your computer?
I do have my own account.
Okay.
I'm going to go ahead.
I use my school accounts.
Okay.
Now, do you, I like know if your account is an administrator account or if it's just a user?
Can you install stuff?
Yeah.
Then you're an administrator about on your, if you're using a school account, you're probably
not an administrator.
I would hope.
Definitely not.
Yeah.
Well, the problem with Isaac here is he's surfing the internet as an administrator, which
means that any malware that touches his computer can also run as an administrator.
Now, I know we've got that thing user access control.
You can see that pops up.
Hey, this thing is trying to do this.
Brady, how hard is that to get around?
That's really easy.
But I have to interject here and just say that Devlin is not telling the entire story.
He asks for a browser games on his mom's computer and his mom's account is an admin.
And he is more than happy to sit there and play browser games.
And what does Dad always say, Devlin, about browser games?
What's the best thing to do?
No, Dad says no browser games, not the best thing to do.
And mom will let Devlin use her account and he will go and play browser games when
Dad is not around.
Absolutely.
Look, we're all human.
I get it.
Those games are fun, aren't they?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's just something to do.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let me go kill some time and see if I can get some malware on my mom's computer.
Wow.
Things have changed since I was a kid.
We used to go out and have BB gun wars.
Well, that's kind of crazy.
How about you, Brady?
Another question?
Yeah, what's that?
Or do you want me to ask a question?
Which one?
I asked the last one.
All right.
Do you have either one of you played Roblox?
Yes.
Once before.
Once, huh?
What about Fortnite?
Bomb good.
That one loves Fortnite.
He plays when he's not supposed to.
They're out the bad news about those two.
So Fortnite is a little different, but Roblox is definitely.
It's a game marketplace.
It's designed for kids, but abused by adults.
A lot of kids end up playing with adults, and they don't even know that they're playing with adults,
because everybody's got the same kind of characters.
Well, and you can create your own little game rooms, can't you?
Yes.
Yes.
Did you know that there's game rooms where there is adult stuff going on inside those rooms?
Everlet.
Yeah.
And yeah, they find them and they shut them down, but how hard is it to just start up another one?
Yeah.
It's all over the place.
So we've got that problem going on, and there's also the problem that those platforms are filled with child predators,
because it's so easy to communicate with kids, and their guard is down because they're playing something that they think is just for kids with other kids.
Which makes them perfect targets.
Not good, but yeah, those sex rooms in there, and worse.
So definitely something to keep in mind.
Roblox has a whole bunch of that.
Kind of crazy, isn't it?
Yeah, and I think this is a shout out to the parents out there as well.
A lot of times I see kids get the phones, and they can be occupied for a stretch of time.
But you have to be careful because all of these apps that are out there and available and they're free to get playing,
and then get in there and get immersed, and they're not in your hair.
Other people have access to your kids.
If your kids aren't paying attention to you, they're paying attention to someone else.
And that's the part that we tend to forget.
And how many parents actually go to check and see what games they're playing?
Do they actually know anything about these games?
Do they actually look and see what they're doing in these games, who they're talking to?
What kind of capabilities are there?
Can those things be disabled?
And, you know, we talked about malware.
Now, I know that people are going to say, oh, but I've got an Apple, so I'm safe.
Isn't that why you buy Apple?
You'll hear it a lot.
Yeah, the largest growing sector for malware last year and the year before.
Is Apple?
Or malware is being created for Apple than Windows.
Roll that around your head for a minute, parents.
And I think this goes back to the illusion of security we were talking about in a previous episode.
Because if you think you're safe, you're actually less safe because you're not being as vigilant.
Absolutely. You put your guard down.
When you get a product and you're told that it's safe or you're playing a game and you think that it's safe,
you let your guard down in the way that you use it.
And that makes you vulnerable.
And everyone who uses your device vulnerable.
And that's kind of the thing is realizing that when we use the internet,
we have to be vigilant all the time.
And it's not just, okay, well, you know, I'm just doing something here.
You got to think about it all the time.
And the problem is, is the internet is something that is deceptively safe.
But Brady, I mean you and I both work in information security,
how safe would you rate the internet?
It is not safe.
You know, whenever I'm teaching a class, I always tell my students,
you guys can go ahead and do this.
So imagine that you go ahead and close your eyes.
Close your eyes.
Now imagine that you are on a bicycle.
Naked.
Riding down the middle of the freeway.
Naked in a parade.
Naked on a bicycle.
Rolling down a freeway with all of these cars and trucks coming at you going past you.
That doesn't sound very safe, does it?
Out of all.
It's not safe and you are that exposed.
People don't realize that your information can all be captured.
People don't realize that it's very easy for me to go into Starbucks
and capture their information as they're doing something.
And I can replay videos that they watch.
I can recreate web sessions.
I can reconstruct emails.
It's kind of nuts.
And people don't realize that.
That information is very vulnerable.
And even if you think that the information is encrypted, is it?
You know, that's what are you connected to?
And is the thing that you're connected to?
A proxy that is breaking the connection.
I'm creating a new connection.
I imagine that you don't want to know what a proxy is, do you?
Are there any sites at school that you can't get to from the schools?
Are there ways to get to those sites?
Not that I've found.
Not that I've tried.
Not that you've tried.
That's a good answer.
Well, I'm going to tell you guys this because you're going to come across it,
especially as you start moving toward, you know, high school.
There's this thing called proxies.
So let's say that your school has, what does use Facebook as an example?
Facebook is blocked.
You can't go to Facebook.
But you really want to go to Facebook because like you want to see what's going on.
Well, there's all these different sites out there that are proxies.
And what does say like proxy.com?
Well, your administrator has Facebook.com block, right?
Is proxy.com blocked?
Probably not.
So you make a connection to proxy.com.
Proxy.com creates a new connection from their servers to Facebook.
So all your firewall at your school sees is this connection to proxy.com.
You, on the other hand, have a full connection to Facebook.
The problem is, in order for proxy.com to create that new connection,
the encryption stops at their server and starts with the new connection,
which means that everything that goes through their server is in plaintext,
including your credentials that you use to log in.
Kind of crazy, isn't it?
And then a bigger bad thing, guys.
Horrible.
And the problem is, kids use these things all the time.
And proxies go up all the, like trying to block proxies is like playing whack-a-mole.
They just, they spin up so many every single day.
And the problem is, is they make sure that kids know about them,
because they know that kids use them.
And here's all these kids using proxies.
And a lot of them are not to be trusted.
So you've got people that are setting up proxies, capturing kids,
log in information to all of their accounts.
So now, not only do they have your pictures and know where you live,
but now they have access to all of your social media accounts.
And whatever else you've logged in using that proxy.
That's kind of crazy, isn't it?
But, you know, I mean, this is one of those things that we don't really tell people
what the actual dangers are when you use the internet.
We just find out that we can do something.
Hey, look, I can get to Facebook, and that's as far as we go with it.
Instead of stopping to ask ourselves, wait a minute.
If I got around a restriction to get there,
what happened to my traffic?
And nobody stops to think about that.
They just want to do something.
And as long as the result is there, then they're happy with it.
Without realizing that the result may have come at a much higher cost
than they would have been wanting to pay.
I think that's a really interesting example.
And I think we need to kind of break that down for a second.
Because it's worth highlighting the feeling of getting around those school restrictions.
Because that's what you guys get.
It's what you're going to see.
Your friends are going to be like, oh, check it out.
I can log into this.
And you're going to say, I can't.
How'd you do it?
But the real question is, if they're connecting to something
that is helping them bypass the rules,
what is the benefit for that site?
Nobody rides for free.
If it's free, then you must be...
You must be the product.
The product.
They are selling you.
And it could be just, you know, they're selling your user information.
Or it could be something much worse.
But the problem is, is how do you know?
And how do you know if that site has been hacked by someone else?
What if it is the legitimate proxy run by a legitimate company?
But they've been compromised by a bad hacker
who now has complete access to all the traffic that goes through that proxy.
And it's crazy.
Anything else you want to throw in on that, Brady?
You know, I don't want to park on it too much.
Old people, they don't like they hate the internet.
And they hate these games.
And they hate the Fortnite's.
But really, we've been around for a while.
And it's about recognizing the dangers.
Because I get it.
Fortnite is fun.
And Fortnite could be safe.
But it could also be very dangerous.
Do you remember lawn darts?
Yes.
So go ahead and describe for our audience what lawn darts were.
So lawn darts are like the actual darts.
But instead of throwing these darts at a dart board,
take that dart and explode it by about 10 times.
Right?
Yeah.
So you've got a dart that's about two foot long.
Now you throw that sucker in the air.
And it goes flying upwards.
And then it comes falling downward.
And stabs into, hopefully, the lawn.
Yeah.
The lawn darts came with these two rings that were about the size of a hulu.
And you would throw them up in the air.
And the goal was to get your dart inside the hoop.
And of course, it's kind of like horseshoes where the closest,
you know, and you get points and stuff like that.
But when you've got this big dart with, you know, it's got a metal tip on it.
How long do you think it took for kids to start doing other things with these darts,
including just throwing it straight up in the air?
Very long.
Not very long at all.
Not very long at all.
Yeah.
There were actually, I mean, there were lots of people that were injured badly.
And there were even people killed when a dart came down and went through their hulu.
Yeah.
And eventually, they made legislation and outlawed it.
And if you find lawn darts today, it's almost impossible to hurt yourself with them.
There's like foam tip.
They're no fun.
The fun is gone.
Yeah.
In a way.
But my point is we have a tool that we use, a game that we use that's every bit is dangerous.
And we've been using it longer than we ever used lawn darts.
And there is no real push from anywhere to actually make this safer.
All people want is the appearance of being safe, rather than actually being safe.
And I'm really glad that you brought that up because another problem site for teenagers.
And it's been demonstrated Instagram for young Instagram.
Because we're in this whole social media environment where.
Showing off the cool stuff, you know, having, you know, get to be an influencer.
Everybody wants to be an influencer.
But what Facebook who owns Instagram found out was that the rates of depression.
And anxiety and bullying all went up for young teens 13 to 18 years old.
With using the Instagram accounts.
So basically why do we why do we permit our kids to have access to Instagram where somebody can say something hurtful and mean.
And just totally leaving out the danger of somebody cyber stalking and capturing where you're going.
And you know, where you like to hang out and when you're at home and when you're at school.
And how you walk from home to school and school to home.
We've that out.
Yeah.
But it's just a team, right?
To be an influencer.
You have to have people following you, right?
And liking your stuff.
Which means what happens if somebody doesn't like your stuff.
And they start attacking you.
The other thing is is when you're looking at all of these other people and the stuff they're posting.
People are posting stuff to make themselves look better than somebody else.
What does that do to your own sense of yourself when you see everybody that has better everything than you?
Find yourself skin.
No wonder they're depressed.
It's like keeping up with the Joneses for kids.
That's a that's a good point, Brady.
What are you going to say, Devlin?
Just yeah, it just starts up that MV lowers how you think about yourself and what you have.
And just makes you want more.
And I tell you what you guys, you're not at the age where you need to be thinking about that yet.
No, that's something that, you know, we actually didn't have to deal with as much as kids.
You know, we talk about, oh, when I was a kid, there was no phone and there was no internet.
And, you know, it was 15 and we had an internet and you'd pull up a web page and it would take sometimes five minutes, ten minutes for a picture to load line by line as it scanned down the picture.
Yeah, but the other side of that is is that we didn't have somebody else always walking around with us basically that could make us feel bad about ourselves.
You know, we left school at school.
Now, there was a landline that a phone that hung on the wall that you could talk to somebody.
But you couldn't spend all day on there usually because, you know, somebody else might be calling the house and they'd be a busy single if you had the line up.
Or if you're lucky, for a while, there was call waiting and it would beep and then you, you know, all I got to go, there's a call from my mom or my dad or whatever.
But the good thing about that is we didn't have such an attack on our self-esteem at all times.
147.
Yeah, that's kind of what our kids are facing and it's rough because comparing yourself to everybody else is a big thing.
You know, that's a natural thing.
But when we were kids, we actually got a break from that.
You know, there was just going outside and playing.
There was, you know, I would get a stick and hit weeds and I was, you know, in this whole adventure cast in magic and all that stuff.
But nowadays, you know, you just get on your phone or you get on the fortnight or the browser games.
Yeah.
The fortnight just for fun.
I know it's not the fortnight.
It's just going to be cool.
But we're old.
The good goals.
But I think that there's a big point there is that our kids do have it a lot harder than us.
You know, we look at it and you have all this information at your fingertips, but there's a big dark side.
There is a reason why Facebook keeps targeting teens with Instagram even though they know it's harmful for them.
It's because we are, oh, excuse me, we are all the product and teens are a very lucrative product.
They are.
They are.
Now, I don't want to bash video games.
I just want to make that clear.
I'm not bashing video games because actually I want to do a future episode talking about the benefits of video games.
But I don't want to get into that on this episode, but I do think talking about the social aspect that goes along with it.
Who you're talking to, what you're talking about, how it makes you feel.
It's very easy to let things get under your skin for people to bully you, push you around, especially if they want to attack you.
I mean, what if you're a good game player?
What does everyone want to do?
Gang up on you.
Gang fast.
Yeah.
And then, you know, I mean, then how much fun is that?
Because now you're going in to play a game and everyone's just smoking you the moment you show up.
Yeah, but games are fun.
You know, the books that I write are based in the, you know, a digital afterlife, you know, game world.
I love games.
And I think what we're talking about here is approaching games from a responsible manner and seeing how big of an impact they can have.
And that not everybody that we're talking to or hanging out with is, you know, who they say they are.
And we're talking to, you know, some younger gentlemen on this podcast, but people get catfished every single day.
I've know a couple of people who have met their spouses on video games.
World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, those MMOs, it's a big one.
And usually, you know, people can form some very deep connections.
And I've seen some beautiful things, but then I've also seen some horrible things.
And it just goes to show, you know, you just can't trust everybody based on who they say that they are.
Absolutely.
It's all about the people, not necessarily about the video game itself.
It is.
So, the important thing that I would like to point out for kids.
Look, whenever you're using the internet, stop to think about what you're doing and ask yourself, should I be doing this?
Is this making me feel bad?
Let your parents know who you're talking to, or at least who you think you're talking to.
Because the thing is, when you have private conversations with people that your parents don't know,
you have eliminated any chance of someone stopping something bad from happening.
You have taken the guardrails completely off.
And I know kids like to have their privacy that, oh, I just want to talk with my friends.
Well, but we've just talked about the fact that they may not really be your friends.
And when you just exclude any adult that could possibly look at those conversations and you end on stuff that you're missing,
you set yourself up for something that could be really bad.
Or bullying.
Look, who wants to go and tell their parents, hey, mom, I'm being bullied online.
But how many, how many kids end up severely depressed because of that?
And we've even had news articles where kids have killed themselves because of being bullied online.
Yeah, and for anybody out there who might be listening, definitely talk to your parents, talk to somebody that you can trust.
But you could also remember that you can step away.
Like there's nothing saying that you have to remain plugged in.
So there have been times, Devlin is experiencing one right now where he was using his phone when he wasn't supposed to,
and doing things he wasn't supposed to be doing with it, and his phone is taken away.
That is a mandatory pull off period.
He does not have access to electronics.
You can do this yourself.
It doesn't have to be a punishment.
You know, having that access, it's, it's a double-edged sword and it can hurt you very badly.
And you can get sucked in, but you don't have to have it as a punishment where your parents take that device away.
You can make that call.
You can step away from the device.
If you're noticing that you get sucked in to certain kinds of content,
if you feel like you got to be sneaking around on your phone, you know, it's probably, if you're sneaking around with it,
you know that you're not doing something you're supposed to be doing.
You can stop that.
So I want to say that if you are feeling bad about yourself and you're not really feeling good about your life,
the more time you spend on your phone, the worse it's going to get.
That goes for me too.
Yeah.
They call it a doom scroll for a reason.
Exactly.
Algorithms have been trained to keep you scrolling.
There's a camera on your phone.
A lot of these very sophisticated social media platforms that we have.
They can actually track when your eyes are on the screen, where they're at on the screen,
how to keep you engaged, how to keep you scrolling, what makes you comment,
what makes you leave that part of the platform and go for something else.
And they are fine tuning these algorithms to keep you sucked in.
They do it to adults.
They do it to kids.
We're all very, very valuable.
My wife falls down the TikTok wrap all the time.
TikTok is one of those things you can hop on.
And you're like, let me do this for five minutes.
The next thing you know, it's like five hours later.
Where did this time go?
All right, man.
I think that's about a wrap for today.
I want to thank you guys for coming on.
Before we go though, let's do a pick of the week if we've got one.
You guys have anything on your end for a pick of the week.
Something cool, fun, doesn't have to be security related.
Just anything at all that you think is kind of cool and would like to share.
Devon me a few seconds to think of something.
Okay.
How was your brain?
Are you got one?
You know, it's a violent game.
But I really hope.
Elden Ring.
If anybody hasn't checked out Elden Ring, it is crazy hard.
I spent the first, I started out as a wretch, which is a level one.
You're pretty much just in a, in a loincloth.
You run out into the world with a stick.
I spent like 10 hours at level one because I didn't know how to level up.
Got my face smashed in so many times.
But I've since, you know, beat the game and moved on to new game plus.
And just a lot of fun.
Over 50, 60 hours worth of play time so far.
Really challenging game that I really enjoyed.
Awesome.
I have to agree with that.
Outstanding.
How about you, Isaac?
You got anything?
Souls is the world of death.
Um, the boys.
We have, we have started watching.
Well, I'm already up the day on the boys, but the boys on Amazon Prime.
Definitely, probably not appropriate for younger kids.
Yeah, I would agree with that one.
Yeah.
But a great series.
It really is.
And for those of you that haven't seen it,
it's basically the justice league with really bad superheroes.
Like really bad.
And heroes is used very lightly.
Yes.
Yes.
So, but it's a good show.
A good series.
Very creative.
Definitely enjoy that.
That was going to be my pick of the week two since it just came back.
So yeah, season three.
The boys.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Definitely worth watching and binging if you're looking for something to get sucked into for a little bit.
All right, man.
Well, sweet.
I guess that's a wrap.
Okay.
Wrap it.
Hey, man.
Till next week.
I'll talk to you later.
Thank you for listening to another episode of The Stuff.
Evil Steve doesn't want you to know.
I'm your host, Lerking Pryon, getting in your brain and perhaps scratching an itch that you didn't know you had.
Until next time, try to stay safe on the internet and win it out.
Quit clicking, shit.
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