Some of you might know the last month I started training my daughter to understand threats on the internet by showing her and ultimately teaching her how to use hacking tools and exploits in a controlled environment. Let me explain why.
It was toward the beginning of the summer this year that her Animal Jam account had been hacked, after she was social engineered into giving her account and password information to another member who promised thousands of "diamonds" (in game money). Needless to say the culprit hijacked her account and changed the email address, taking over her entire account.
My daughter was devastated.
It was then just a few weeks later her computer was infected by malware while browsing for Minecraft Mods, Mind you this 8 yr. old bundle of joy had already taught herself how to install mods, by watching Youtube videos, and has built her own server with installed mods, she enjoys playing.
Having been infected several times in the past, and my anger displayed having to constantly clean yet another machine on our network, she thought she was in trouble. When I got home she ran to her Mom and started crying. She thought she was in trouble for something she had done wrong.
Needless to say the tears got to me, and i decided to spend some time explaining what Malware was and what it was used for. Somewhere during the conversation hacking was brought up and my daughters face turned pale.
"Daddy you're a hacker!" she said with a look of distrust.
"Im a good Hacker its not the same." I responded.
The expression on her face was both amusing and concerning as I could tell she didn't understand the difference.
So i decided to take the time to show her tools like SET and Metasploit and as you can imagine she took to them amazingly fast. Scary fast.
Well maybe it was my fault for not setting the rules but a few days ago I was called by the School, and demanded to meet with the principle of the school, her teacher, and the school philologist. At first this call came at no surprise, as we have met several times over the last two years. Turns out my Daughter suffers from ADHD like her Dad.
So I get to the school and sit down with the three of them and I'm informed she had been "caught" downloading a criminal application called "Metasploit"
When my daughter was questioned as to why she was trying to download the software, she advised them she just wanted to show the other kids what her Daddy had taught her.
Then as if it couldn't get worse when asked what her Daddy did for a living she told them "He's a hacker"
a good daddy :) proud of you man.
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