One of the numerous little Internet-only memes concerns a humorous list called If I Became An Evil Overlord, which has been around in some form for several years. Among its many prudent and useful suggestions comes this gem:

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

Jon Penn is a little older than the minimum required age for assessing Evil Overlord plans, but he’s certainly got the right ideas when it comes to securing his school’s network. A piece at Network World discussed the lad and his efforts at ridding the network of spam and viruses.

We applaud one step in particular the young man implemented, after identifying all the garbage adrift on the Victory Baptist School’s machines in Sherwood, Arkansas. Penn persuaded the grown-ups to stop the influx of junk at the gateway, rather than trying to control it PC by PC.

We’ve been advocates of moving the spam and virus fight to the gateway, preferably beyond even the corporate gateway to the ISP realm, for some time. If a child can figure out this is the best solution, you might want to ask your IT folks why they are so much smarter than a 5th grader about this while you’re deleting hundreds of spam messages every day.