Cybersecurity course works to protect kids online
Sheriff’s office teaches tips designed to engage students, adults on the dangers of the web.
JACKSON — For parents, sometimes even the headlines are difficult to read. Child sexual exploitation is on the rise: worldwide, nationally and in Wyoming.
The Teton County Sheriff’s Office continues to strive to equip community members with information and tips to navigate the World Wide Web in a safer manner.
“There is no profile for these kinds of things,” said Dustin Richards, who is the digital forensics deputy at the Teton County Sheriff’s Office who works with the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force to investigate and adjudicate child sexual exploitation cases in Teton County. “The best thing is to take it to heart and make sure you know what your kids are doing online.”
Richards offers a courtesy course called “Internet Safety and Protecting Yourself Online,” designed for adults and students. The course is about an hour long and addresses basic “how to” solutions for adults and parents looking to protect children against online predators.
The Teton County Sheriff’s Office has made a few presentations in the region to church groups, school organizations and the News&Guide. The course highlights simple tactics that online predators use to engage children.
Jackson Hole Community School invited deputies to present the course to its student body and staff last fall.
“It was an outstanding decision for us to take the course as a school,” said Ted Smith, head of the private nonprofit school. “The sheriff’s office sees the good and bad of cybersecurity, and they were fantastic. They did a great job of saying the difficult things out loud.”
Smith said the school recognizes that social media and digital access plays a major role in the lives of young students. He said at the start of the school year, the staff was looking for ways to further not only the student body, but the staff’s edification when it came to online engagement.
“My biggest takeaway from the course: Unless you are certain, you can’t trust anyone online,” said Smith. “Whether you are dealing with someone online, personally, for academics or whatever, you have to make sure you can verify who you are engaging with.”
The course covers a variety of practical applications that students and adults can apply to online use including digital safeguards on popular applications such as Reddit, Discord and Kik.
The course also offers an eye-opening reality to the staggering amount of people online. Consider that there are 41,000 posts on Facebook every second, 3,600 photos uploaded to Instagram every second and 204 million emails sent every second.
“Yes, it was hard to talk about, but the kids left with some real-life stories of caution,” Smith said of the course.
Richards said the sheriff’s office works on one to two cases of child exploitation a month, many of which are sexting and sextortion cases. Tips for one case can come from multiple sources, Richards added.
Currently, there are two active cases of child exploitation working through 9th District Court in Teton County.
The Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children task force reported a 40% increase in crimes against kids in 2023 compared to the previous year. In the first three months of 2024, there was a 60% surge in reports, with 256 tips received, up from 160 during the same period in the previous year.
“The exploitation of children has exploded with the rise of the internet,” said John Clark, former CEO of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “We are no longer just dealing with strangers in vans — the threat is in our children’s bedrooms, on their screens.”
This story was published on March 26, 2025.