The FBI is encouraging students, teachers, and parents to take advantage of the FBI’s Safe Online Surfing program as many children begin their school year online.

The goal of FBI’s Safe Online Surfing (SOS) Internet Challenge program is to teach children in third through eighth grades how to recognize and respond to online dangers such as cyberbullying, online predators, and identity thieves. The SOS program teaches young people about web terminology and how to recognize secure and trustworthy sites. Other lessons cover how to protect personal details online, create strong passwords, avoid viruses and scams, be wary of strangers, and be a good virtual citizen.

More than 1 million students completed the program and took the SOS exam during the 2018-2019 school year. SOS activities are available to everyone to use, but teachers can register for a class to participate in the tests and competition. Any public, private, or home school in the United States with at least five students is eligible for the online challenge, which meet state and federal standards. Teachers manage their students’ participation in the program and the FBI does not collect or store any student information.

Since October 2012, the FBI-SOS website has been visited nearly 3.6 million times. Here is a link to the website for students, parents, and teachers: https://sos.fbi.gov/en/.

Here is the link to the Spanish language site: https://sos.fbi.gov/es/