A thing that has puzzled me for a while is the tendency of previous generations (including my own to be honest. I was born in 1966) to constantly underestimate the capabilities of the new generations (born in 1990 and onwards) and their access to the Internet. Although there is constant talk about this (see my post on "digital immigrants and digital natives" elsewhere on this blog for an example) I strongly believe that we do not really understand the consequences of this development!

Let me try to give just one example of what I'm thinking. The generation(s) born in 1990 are 19 years old today. They are completing their educations and have therefore begun to appear on the job markets globally. These people have never known a world without computers, without mobile phones and, most importantly, without Internet access! In other words they have grown up with all (or at least most of) the knowledge ever created on planet Earth immidiately available at their fingertips ... try to think about this for a minute! It is absolutely mindboggling.

This means that they do not have to re-invent anything. A few searches on Goggle and they have several solutions and answers to almost any problem or question they should come across - some of them wrong, some of them right. I could talk for days about the consequences of this, as there are legio aspects of this that we are only beginning to understand. One is that you can *never* assume that the kid is not able hack whatever it is you're trying to protect because he (yes, it is almost definitely a "he" for some reason ... but that'll change too) doesnt know how or doesnt have the skills ... He doesnt have to anymore! 2 searches on Google and you have 4 different ways of hacking that the guy can try. If one doesnt work the next one will. If that doesnt work he can instantly chat with 10.000 highly skilled semi-professional IT experts that are more than willing to tell him how. How can he fail? The most scary thing about this is that these generations doesnt even think about it. This is simply "the way it is". Internet access and hence knowledge access is a given fact.

A new paradigm to IT security is definitely required for this reason alone, and this is just one reason as I'm sure you all know. We think we have begun to understand some of this at Giritech and we are therefore working from an end-to-end paradigm to protecting "stuff". We believe this could be a very powerful answer to the challenges from the new generations. Give us a call to discuss, we would love to hear your opinions and feedback.