Know about Shourya Saluja who developed a cyber security curriculum

Shourya Saluja, a Class 12 student of Indus International School-Bangalore, is busy in the process of developing a curriculum for Classes IX to XII, which will create awareness about cyber safety. The 17-year-old Shourya has got the support from technology major Infosys to design the curriculum, which will be taught first in his school and later perhaps adopted by CBSE, reports Sruthy Susan Ullas of Times of India.
The three components of the curriculum will focus on different safety issues of social networking sites. "Children disclose too much information in their profiles, they upload photos and accept random people as friends just to increase the number in their friends' list. They don't know what dangers this can lead to," said Shourya. Kids will also be taught how to protect themselves from dangers like phishing messages, things to look after in a Local Area Network (LAN), internal security.

Cyberethics will be another subject and kids will be tutored on how to be a good cyber citizen. Infosys will leverage its "subject matter expertise" to develop content as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative.

Shourya plans to rate the success of his programme after six months and then seek the Central Board of Secondary Education's approval to include it in the curriculum. He says he got the idea when his 10-year-old sister asked him to create a Facebook profile with all her information. "I realized that many children are ignorant about consequences of this," he said.

He approached the Punjab College of Engineering which has a cyber security research centre. "When I suggested teaching cyber safety in high school, they gave me the thumbs up. I did a three-week internship there, conducted surveys, did research and presented papers on the gap between the present curriculum and proved the need for this course." In June second week, Shourya presented a paper to Infosys and convinced it to help him in the course content.