Cybersecurity is a rapidly growing field that specializes in securing and defending operating systems and servers, devices, networks, and data from malicious attacks. On a personal level, we know that our email can be hacked or our social media accounts can be compromised. On a corporate level, there has been an alarming number of data breaches in recent years. On a national scale, even our government and civic infrastructure are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Perhaps the biggest threat to maintaining our way of life involves the need to secure our country’s citizens, online infrastructure that’s directly tied to physical infrastructure, pipelines, and more.

Welcome to the Attention Economy–where you are the product. In this digital landscape, they keep score with eyeballs and eardrums. Your attention–even for a few seconds–translates into cold, hard cash they're willing to manipulate and even hack you for.

A study on tween and teen media use conducted by Common Sense Media in 2019 revealed some intriguing data. They found that over two-thirds (69%) of kids have their own smartphone by 12 years of age. That means that most middle schoolers and their parents have entered the world of smartphones, with all its apps, online entertainment, and social media interaction.

Another particularly eyebrow-raising finding is that only 15% of tweens report using an app or a tool to track their device time, and only about one in four tweens (28%) say that their parent uses an app or tool to track their child’s time spent on a device. While 50% of tweens say that their parent does use some type of app or tool to monitor what they do on their devices, this still leaves a lot of young people unchecked with what they do and how long they use their phones each day.