Tackling the seedy cyber-underbelly

This week saw the official launch of Australia’s high-speed National Broadband Network (NBN), the planned fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network that is promising users internet speeds of 100Mb/sec and more.  Fortuitously for Roar, Tasmania was selected as the first area for NBN rollout, and we understand that the schools and households at Smithton, Scottsdale and Midway Point are already connecting up.

In Tasmania the excitement is palpable.  The possibilities for education, health, the world of doing business, and community-building are being spruiked on almost every street corner.  But what about the ‘dark side’, the seedy cyber-underbelly that high-speed broadband is likely to bring?

Experts say that the NBN will heighten the levels of cyber risk: from serious threats to individuals via cyber-bullying, online grooming, and sexting, or incidents of ID theft or fraud, or matters relating to intellectual property, through to less personal but more insidious forms of cyber-threat including spam attacks, phishing attacks, compromised personal computers adding to botnets, distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks etc – matters of personal security that directly impact on national security and Australia’s digital economy.

So what’s to be done about cyber-safeguarding?  Do children and young people, parents and families – indeed all citizens – know how to make safe, ethical, responsible use of digital technologies?  What should be the mechanisms for delivering current, dynamic cyber-safety education to the citizens of the nation?  Needless to say, Roar is ready, willing and able to tackle this challenge…