Depending on your life experiences, the phrase (or country song by Eric Church) \u201ctwo pink lines\u201d may bring up a wide range of powerful emotions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I suspect, like many fathers and expecting fathers, I will never forget the moment I found out my wife was pregnant.\u00a0 You might recall what you were doing, or where you were and maybe even what you were thinking.\u00a0\u00a0 As a professional ethical hacker, I have been told many times \u2013 \u201cYou just think a little differently about things.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I sure hope so, since that\u2019s my day job and sure enough this experience wasn\u2019t any different.\u00a0 My brain immediately asked the question, \u201cHow am I going to ensure my family is protected from a wide range of cyberthreats?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Having a newborn opens the door to all sorts of new technology and I would be a fool not to take advantage of all devices that makes parenting easier. \u00a0\u00a0So how do we do this safely?<\/p>\n
The security industry has a well-known concept called the \u201cprinciple of least privilege. \u201cThis simply means that you don\u2019t give a piece of technology more permissions or access than it needs to perform its primary function. \u00a0\u00a0This can be applied well beyond just technology that helps parents; however, for me it’s of extra importance when we talk about our kids.\u00a0 One of the parenting classes I took preparing for our newborn suggested we use a baby tracking phone app.\u00a0\u00a0 This was an excellent idea, since I hate keeping track of anything on paper.\u00a0 So I started looking at a few different apps for my phone and discovered one of them asked for permission to use \u201clocation services,\u201d also known as GPS, along with access to my phone contacts.\u00a0 This caused me to pause and ask: Why does an app to track my baby\u2019s feeding schedule need to know where I am?\u00a0 Why does it need to know who my friends are?\u00a0\u00a0 These are the types of questions parents should consider before just jumping into the hottest new app.\u00a0 For me, I found a different, less popular app which has the same features, just with a little less access.<\/p>\n
It’s not always as easy to just \u201cfind something else.\u201d\u00a0 In my house, \u201cif momma ain\u2019t happy, nobody is happy.\u201d\u00a0 So, when my wife decided on a specific breast pump that came with Bluetooth and is internet enabled, that\u2019s the one she is going to use.\u00a0\u00a0 The app backs up all the usage data to a server in the cloud.\u00a0\u00a0 There are many ways that this can be accomplished securely, and it is not necessary a bad feature, but I didn\u2019t feel this device benefited from being internet connected.\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, I simply lowered its privileges by not allowing it internet access in the settings on her phone.\u00a0 The device works perfectly fine, she can show the doctor the data from her phone, yet we have limited our online exposure and footprint just a little more.\u00a0 This simple concept of least privilege can be applied almost everywhere and goes a long way to limiting your exposure to cyber threats.<\/p>\n