With Christmas just round the corner and expectant children worldwide hoping for presents from Santa Claus for their good behavior, Kaspersky Lab has revealed which countries’ children are the worst culprits for risky online behavior over the last 12 months.
Based on global statistics for its Parental Control module, the research shows that the most attempts to visit dangerous websites by an underage user were recorded, Singapore (94 attempts), Philippines (56 attempts) and Malaysia (47 attempts).
Young Vietnamese are most interested in weapons (1.6 attempts) while youngsters from Cambodia are most visitors to gambling sites (1.9 attempts). In other parts of Asia, children from Japan are most likely to try and visit sites categorized as ‘Adult content’ (39 attempts) and ‘Software, audio, video’ (104 attempts) – the latter category includes sites with unlicensed content.
The research covers the year from December 2015 to November 2016, and includes data gathered from Kaspersky Lab security solutions for Windows and Mac OS X with the Parental Control module enabled.
The statistics are based on the number of attempted visits the module records to sites that fall under the seven preconfigured categoriesdeemed most dangerous for kids by Kaspersky Lab experts. The statistics are presented as the number of attempts per user per year.
In fairness, it should be noted that not all these attempts are deliberate; for example, children can end up on these sites by accidentally clicking a banner or a link shared by someone else.
Meanwhile, another study conducted by Kaspersky Lab in 2016 and covering 3,780 families in seven countries found that, 31% of kids have completed financial transactions on the internet and would like to do it again. This includes buying apps in app stores (23%), online shopping (16%) and even gambling (5%).
“Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and this is especially true for parents who today have to protect their children from undesirable and sometimes dangerous information in both the real and virtual worlds,” comments Sylvia Ng, General Manager of South East Asia at Kaspersky Lab. “A mom or a dad cannot always be next to their kid to prevent a casual encounter with, say, pornographic content or sites promoting drug use. That’s why specialized IT solutions are so important in warning parents and helping to prevent children from visiting this type of content.”
Unfortunately, Santa Claus was not available for comment.