The research "Children OnlineKaspersky Lab reveals that more than two-thirds (68%) of the company's Parental Control technology users have experienced inappropriate for children or harmful online content in 2014. Specifically, technologies protectionher Kaspersky Lab identified several categories of harmful material, such as content that is inappropriate for minors, gambling, and weapons information sites.
The main findings of the company's report are as follows:
- Over Hate (59,5%) users in Greece they were confronted with pornographic content. 38,7% encountered gambling/gambling websites, while almost one in four users encountered gun websites. Accordingly, 20% of users came across websites that contained abusive content and profanity.
- Websites that carry such inappropriate content (pornography, gambling, weapons, abusive content), and others related to drugs, tobacco products and alcohol were the ones most often hampered by its solutions Kaspersky Lab.
The Internet has long been a privilege for adults. Children are often much more active users than their parents. But is it safe enough for children to use it without the fear of having to deal with inappropriate content? With this in mind, Kaspersky Lab has decided to investigate possible online threats to children by analyzing data from users of the company's products that have a Parental Control Unit.
Sites that carry such inappropriate content (pornography, chat, gambling, and weapons) along with others that "host" drugs, tobacco and alcohol, were most often blocked by Kaspersky Lab's protection solutions. The frequency of tracking shows how easy it is for users to find such content on the Internet.
Beyond that, in the world, the countries where her Parental Control solutions Kaspersky Lab identified inappropriate content more often than not China, the USA, Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia. France, Vietnam, Brazil and Algeria were also found in the top ten of the ranking, but were relatively safer due to lower tracking frequency.
Each country or region has its own particular features with respect to the dominant ones online threats for children. For example, inappropriate content was the biggest threat to users in most Eastern European countries. In Greece, 185 has been detected for such content per user. Similarly, high numbers were also observed in countries such as the Czech Republic (66 user-perceived trajectories), Romania (127 traces per user) and Hungary (263 traces per user).
Content on alcohol, tobacco products and drugs was a major threat to users in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the US and France, with the frequency of detection being particularly high in these countries. Gambling and gambling pages have emerged as the biggest online threat to children in the Baltic States (118 user-based tracking).
"To protect children and young people, we suggest that adults choose security solutions with built-in Parental Control technologies and make full use of child protection functions in search engines, but also in applications that allow access to multimedia content that children use. Although Parental Control technologies can block access to websites with content that is unsuitable or dangerous to children, they can not provide reliable protection in situations where services such as social networks or chat, which are assumed to be safe in advance, are misused by malicious people or those who launch attacks cyber-bullying. The issue of Internet security deserves to be treated as seriously as security in the real world. For this reason, we urge parents to take an active role in the real and digital lives of their children. Only then can they feel confident that they will not escape the moment their children may need their support, said Konstantin Ignatev, Manager of Kaspersky Lab's Web Content Analysts Group.
The full text of her research Kaspersky Lab for online threats facing children is available atSecurelist.com.
The Parental Control Unit for OS X and Windows operating systems is built into the consumer security products of the company (Kaspersky Internet Security - Multi-Device 2015 and Kaspersky Total Security - Multi-Device). Also, Kaspersky Lab has recently introduced a new standalone solution, Kaspersky Safe Kids Beta (for OSX, Windows, Android, and iOS devices), which protects children from inappropriate online content.
