Kaspersky Lab: Every year, more and more children are using the Internet. Most parents are well aware of pages with unwanted content such as pornography, violence and drug use scenes, etc. However, many parents can not imagine what specific categories of unwanted websites visit their children more or how often they visit them. Analyzing a dataset[1], η Kaspersky Lab σκιαγράφησε τα «μοντέλα» online αναζήτησης πολλών νεαρών χρηστών.
Kaspersky Lab's research focused on ten categories of unwanted content: pornographic / sensual content, illegal software, drugs, violence, abusive content, weapons, gambling, anonymous proxy servers, payment systems and online games.
10 Prohibited Categories
Usually, parents consider three categories of unwanted content as… extremely undesirable for their children. These include pornographic / sensual material, violence, and drugs. For these three categories, the research came to the following conclusions:
- Almost all over the world, sites in the "pornographic/sensual material" category are - by a wide margin - in first place in terms of traffic, based on alerts που προέρχονται από τη unit Γονικού Ελέγχου (Parental Control) της Kaspersky Lab. Τα υψηλότερα ποσοστά επισκέψεων[2] on pornographic / sensual pages were recorded in Japan (74,9%) and in France (68,9%). In third place was found Mexico (56,3%)
- Websites in the "violence" category receive the most frequent visits from Mexico (8,6%), the USA (7%) and from Europe – mainly from the United Kingdom and Spain (4,8% for each country). Based on Parental Control statistics, websites in this category are not particularly popular. However, it is worth mentioning that it is practically impossible for someone to enter these websites by mistake, as they must first have deliberately located them online. This means that parents should pay attention to this risk and be concerned.
- The highest traffic to the 'drugs' category is again recorded in Mexico (1,8%) and US (1,4%). The third place is followed by the United Kingdom (0,9%)
The category of illegal software is particularly popular in China, where the highest percentage of traffic is recorded (69,4%, vs. 24% of Spain and 10,6% of Japan). Websites of this category pose an additional risk, as they do not just offer illegal software, but they often promote the computer to potential victims.
The other categories in percentages
- Absorption content: Russia (10,7%), Italy (9%), Mexico (7,7%)
- Weapons: Russia (26,4%), Italy (13,7%), USA (12%)
- Gambling: Italy (15,7%) USA (15,4%), United Kingdom (13,5%)
- Anonymous proxy-servers: Mexico (2,1%), United Kingdom (1,2%), Italy (0,8%)
- Credit card payment systems: Italy (8,5%), France (5,5%), Germany (2%)
- Online games: Germany (41,1%), Australia (13,4%), USA (11,2%)
The following chart summarizes the figures for Greece:
Commenting on the findings, the Anna LarkinaKaspersky Lab's Senior Web Content Analyst said: "Together with unwanted content, the Internet also carries other risks that are just as important to children as cyber-bullying or trolling. Insiders can take advantage of all possible online channels - including social, forum, chat and messenger pages. When combined, they can cause great suffering to the victims. In fact, the battle against controlling is not so simple and therefore, the parental control function is not as effective in fighting it. As a rule, children can not cope with the attackers themselves. Therefore, parents play an important role in protecting children from cyber-bullying. Ideally, parents should pay close attention to the online activity of their children. "
More information is available at securelist.com.
[1] The data were obtained from its statistics Kaspersky Security Network based on alerts from Kaspersky Lab's Parental Control module, which allows the analysis of unwanted content categories of the websites most frequently visited by children. These statistics are collected anonymously, irrespective of whether a certain category is considered dangerous by the parents and is therefore prohibited by the Parental Control.
[2]Percentages represent the traffic of the sites in that category relative to the total visits made in each country to the 10 categories of webpages used for this survey.
