October 29, 2007 

A nationally renowned cybersleuth and veteran consultant to the FBI warns parents about online threats to their children. Gary Warner, the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s director of research in computer forensics, says issues of cyberparenting are similar to other parenting issues. “It all depends on your child and their level of maturity and trustworthiness,” Warner says.

But there are steps parents can take to protect their children from risks, Warner says:

• The computer should be in a high-traffic area in the house.
  
• Ask questions about your child’s online friends. “Ask those questions that any good parent would ask about their children’s
  friends.”
• Ask your child to share his or her MySpace and Facebook passwords with you, and once a week, sit with the child and look at the child’s profile and friends and make a decision together whether the social networking accounts still are a good idea.
  
• Recommend to your children that they only spend time on line with people that they have met in real life. “It’s just too dangerous to meet people on line, especially for children.”
  
• Prevent your child from being able to install software in order to protect your computer.
  
• You may want to use a separate computer for your family’s personal finances than the one your children use.
  

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Warner is available to talk about cyberparenting and other issues of cyber crime and cyber security.

CONTACT: Ginny Smith 205-934-1676 or ginnys@uab.edu

Note: We are the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Please use our full name on first reference and UAB thereafter