Sophos Cloud Optix
Cyberscare-of-the-moment is the “Momo challenge”, named after an admittedly rather freaky Japanese sculpture known as Momo, or the Mother-Bird.
The sculpture was made a few years ago by a horror-movie special effects artist and displayed at an art exhibition.
Pictures of the sculpture began to circulate online over the last year or two…
…and on-and-off rumours followed, claiming that creepy internet users had been using the image to put terrible ideas into childrens’ heads.
In many ways, the “Momo challenge” is much like the infamous Talking Angela hoax from five or six years ago.
In the Talking Angela saga, panicked users all over the world suddenly started telling each other that an innocent app featuring a talking cat was actually a front for online child abuse.
Time to stop the hype
The “Momo challenge” rumours have had a massive resurgence recently, thanks to widespread media coverage and numerous celebrity tweets.
We decided it was time for some plain-speaking advice to keep you safe.
Watch our latest Naked Security Live video:
(Watch directly on YouTube if the video won’t play here.)
PS. Like the shirt in the video? They’re available at: https://shop.sophos.com/
Like, wait wat!? TALKING ANGELA!? Are you serious!? When in the living hell did people think of that!?
It seems its fashionable these days to downplay or humiliate parents that were susceptible to this or any hoax. It’s all well and good having hindsight as it’s always 20/20. So what do we do whilst we are in that ‘zero-day’ period of it yet been revealed that it’s a hoax? We all do our proactive monitoring and awareness, but do we just bury our heads in the sand and hope that it is a hoax? These are our kids that we are talking about, so it’s now wonder that there is panic.
The thing is, we aren’t in a “zero-day” period at all. This whole Momo Challenge thing has come and gone for a couple of years already, as the video explains, and the wheels have not come off the world.
This isn’t about hoaxing, it’s about our collective propensity to fixate on one part of a problem in the hope that by “solving” just that bit of it, instead of addressing the overall issue, we can save ourselves the effort of solving it properly.
If you think that, by going out of your way to stop your kids seeing *this specific image*, you are usefully preparing them for the tools and tribulations of online life…
…well, that’s a bit like trying to stop them taking up smoking by making sure they never buy one specific brand of ciagarette. Any and all of the 100s of other brands are OK – just as long as they never smoke Acme Filter Tips they’ll be fine!
Agree with a few of your points Paul, but i don’t think the issue is solvable at all. This is the nature of the internet and there s only so much children can understand. What if the threat had been real, would our ‘panicking’ have been justified? If we as parents want to panic – let us, it’s not about the wheels coming off the world, it’s about us doing everything we can to keep our kids safe and not having to deal with people who downplay/humiliate after the event has been proved a hoax.
In my opinion, panicking never ends well, and that’s the problem.
The reason that this particular image is causing so much stress to kids right now – and from what I can see they are scared about it in case they stumble across it in the future, rather than because they have already seen it – is that adults have pretty much imbued the image file itself with some kind of “evil-eye” superpower, and transferred an ill-formed fear – accompanied by dangerously incomplete advice – to their children.
In an online world as awash as it is with porn, gambling, celebrity drug addictions, sexualisation, targeted advertising, location tracking, hate speech, fake news, malware, grooming, phishing…heck, I’m making myself scared now…
…I earnestly think that “doing everything we can to keep our kids safe”, as you put it, involves all of us making an effort to maintain a much better-informed view of cyberthreats and how to avoid them than we do now.
We prefer a well-rounded approach in most aspects of our children’s education – I doubt any parent would send a 7-year-old to a school that refused to teach any subject other than Geography, for example – so why not the same well-rounded approach to online life?