Ask HN: Please, do whatever you can to keep Internet safe during this crisis

With the closing of schools, our kids are going to use the Internet a lot to follow online courses. A lot of non tech savvy adults are also going to use tools they might not be familiar with.

Today, we've seen teachers using discord to dispense courses, professors using twitch to livestream classes, sometime to a very young audience.

While this made the geek in me very happy, I suddenly realized: this is the perfect moment for black hat hackers, harassers, sex predators... to do "bad stuff". They will also have more time online than ever.

As a father, white hat, geek and tinker, I am calling the tech community to be very careful and do what they can to assist and protect other users.

A few threats that popped into my mind:

- NSFW messages in chat like discords: teach users how to properly configure the client, maybe discord themselves can also do something temporarily

- Streaming platforms: teachers are using it, we don't want those streams with our underage kids to be hijacked, account credentials and stream key must be protected. Teach streamers good credential hygiene.

- Hijack of unencrypted student records (grades, names, address...), could be use for bullying or other nasty things.

- Hijack of unprotected ip cameras used to monitor kids.

Nothing in this list if really new, but I fear the risk will be much higher in the upcoming weeks.

We, as the tech community, will have a central role in the crisis, we need to be tolerant, humble, helpful, compassionate, patient, watchful and generous. We will need, more than ever, to develop, install, configure, integrate, maintain and most importantly: teach and educate.

In those hard times, I wish you all, my fellow HN community, the best.