Taking up the cyber security battle

Doing their bit about the all-important issue of cyber security are two teenagers from Hyderabad — Mavika Boyini and Raviteja Anumukonda.

The two recently won the Google Web Rangers contest, an initiative to encourage teenagers to promote safe Internet use. While Mavika took up the topic of cyber bullying and made it visually appealing by explaining it through a comic, Raviteja gave tips about safe passwords through a video.

“My project was directed towards the younger group and how they should be safe on the Internet. I took up the topic cyber bullying and explained it through a comic. In the end I also gave information about being aware of what’s spam and how to be safe on social networking sites,” says 16-year-old Mavika, who recently completed Class X from Nasr School.

“I made a video with my friend Raunak Mohapatra about how to create safe passwords. It’s a very complex process... a lot of websites require you to have numerals, some require capital letters, symbols etc. We give tips on how to create a password that you can remember and how to train your brain to remember it if you can’t,” says Raviteja, who will be going to Class XI at Chirec Public School.

Explaining the process, 16-year-old Raviteja adds, “For instance, you can take a sentence, change a few letters to numbers and shorten it down. Take this sentence for example from Harry Potter — ‘Severus Snape killed Albus Dumbledore’.

Instead of Severus you can write ‘7rus’, for killed you can put an arrow towards the word Albus Dumbledore. It’s something you can relate to in your life and something that can’t be guessed in the first try. When I was a kid, for a long time my password was my first name and I didn’t realise how unsafe that was.”

Talking about how important it is to create awareness about cyber security, Raviteja says, “It is extremely important because technology is advancing so fast, and it’s literally in our pockets all the time. People put all their information on their phones and how much of it is being shared online and how much do other people know is something that we need to focus on.”