Over 3,000 students graduated from the first class of cyber ambassadors last year. And following the success of the first batch, the Telangana government—which is perhaps the first state in India to have come up with a novel concept like this—has started the second batch of the course with almost 10,000 students. Telangana has over 5 million students across more than 40,000 public schools.
Sailaja Vadlamudi, one of the two teachers of the program, explains that with rising cybercrime cases, and the pandemic providing more digital access to people, the government wanted to help out the most vulnerable: students in public schools. She says that the course is taught in simple, understandable language with real-life analogies for the children to grasp the concept quickly. For instance, she tells her students to treat passwords like a toothbrush: change them often and don’t share them with anyone else.
“When we looked into statistics, we realized that there is a huge rise in cybercrime especially targeting women and children,” says Vadlamudi, who also works at SAP as senior director and chief expert of security and data privacy. “We can always give them tools, but in the end, if people have the right set of awareness, then they can become the strongest chain in this entire ecosystem of cybercrimes.”
Students who are chosen to partake in the program are also given a series of assignments that help them understand how to handle attempted scams, like phishing links or fake job postings where the teachers asked them to double-check email addresses and look for misspellings—indicators that the content is part of a swindle.
As for the program successfully helping people avoid falling prey to online scams, Vadlamudi remembers one specific instance where a student said her father, a daily wage worker, received a call from someone pretending to be from a bank asking for the one-time password. Before the student became a cyber ambassador, her father would have perhaps shared these details. But since his daughter warned him not to do so, he knew it was a trap and refused to share the information.
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and author, says that controlling cyber scams is a difficult task, because “these scams prey on the most vulnerable and the most ignorant.” He explains that people are often reliant on third parties—typically banks and other financial institutions—to recognize scams in progress and try to intervene.
That said, Schneier believes that the Telangana police’s approach of catching them young shows potential. “I think it’s a great idea,” says Schneier, who is also an adjunct lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School. “Computer literacy generally starts with the young and moves upward, so this is a great way to leverage that natural expertise.”