Hundreds of children and young adults in Bahrain have admitted to sharing personal details online with people that they do not know.

In a recent survey conducted by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), almost half of the 3,400 children and young adults questioned said they had revealed personal information to strangers after talking to them on the Internet, said a report in the Gulf Daily News (GDN), our sister publication.

The most affected age group is 14 to 18-year-olds, who often post personal photographs and share social media account details online, according to TRA cyber security director Dr Khalid bin Duaij Al Khalifa.

“Online safety of children is a major concern for us, as they are utilising online spaces in ways that adults often cannot imagine,” he said.

“It is also a challenge for us at the TRA to protect the country's children from cyber threats because the last survey we conducted showed that 43 per cent of teenagers were in contact with people online who they had never met.

“It is evident that most of the children covered in the survey have not undergone basic Internet safety training.”

Speaking at the opening of the three-day Child Online Protection Workshop, which got underway yesterday at the Ritz-Carlton, Bahrain Hotel and Spa, Dr Al Khalifa said youngsters were making themselves easy prey for online 'predators' who could access their social media profiles and use them 'for wrong purposes'.

The aim of the workshop, which is being held in co-operation with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is to 'identify a framework' and 'develop the right tools' that can be used to protect children online, the TRA official said.

The GDN reported in March last year that four people suspected of sexually exploiting children online had been arrested following a request from the now defunct UK-based Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

According to SOCA officials, the men arrested had blackmailed a youngster into supplying indecent photos of himself by threatening to share other pictures with his schoolmates.

Director of the ITU regional cyber security centre in Oman, Aziza Al Rashdi, told the GDN that the majority of the requests she receives from Bahrain relate to child protection online.

“The centre in Oman provides different types of cyber security assessments to 22 Arab countries on different areas,” she said.

“The information requested by Bahrain is mainly related to child online protection.”

However, Al Rashdi cautioned that attacks by hackers on state companies and government bodies was the highest priority cyber security problem that needed to be tackled in the region.

“I think the biggest threat in this part of the region is the targeting of critical national infrastructure and we do not have the necessary counter measures to deal with this problem,” she said.

In 2012, a cyber attack on Saudi Aramco damaged 30,000 workstations at the oil giant, but failed to disrupt production.

Al Rashdi urged Bahraini authorities to set up a Computer Emergency Readiness Team that could directly co-ordinate with the centre in Oman to help deter future threats. - TradeArabia News Service