Woburn, MA – December 7, 2017 – A new report from Kaspersky Lab found that half of parents (51%) think online threats to their children are increasing, and one-in-three feel that they do not have any control over what their children see or do online. Kaspersky Lab’s 2017 consumer security risks survey, “Not logging on, but living on,” demonstrates that this increased level of concern about cyberthreats faced by children may be a result of internet usage becoming a deeply integrated facet of people’s everyday lives.

Between desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices and wearables, people of all ages no longer log on to the internet – they are simply online all the time. Children often have even more freedom to spend their time online and explore the unpredictable world of the internet, particularly during the school holidays. To find out about the concerns facing parents whose children are active on the internet, Kaspersky Lab questioned adults around the world with children under the age of 18.

Nearly two-in-three parents (65%) surveyed agreed that their children use the internet and that they are concerned about their online safety. Furthermore, over half of parents are worried that their children have uncontrolled access to inappropriate content online (57%) and that using the internet can negatively affect their children’s health (53%).

Unfortunately, parents’ fears about their children’s online safety are not unfounded. Kaspersky Lab’s research found that 41 percent of parents admit their child has recently faced some form of online threat, such as viewing inappropriate content, encountering malicious software or sharing too much personal information.

In response to these threats, the research found that parents deploy a variety of methods to help keep their children safe online. The most popular strategy is talking to children to educate them about online threats, which 37 percent of parents state that they have done. Other ways parents protect their children include limiting their time online, supervising online activity and checking internet history. Less than a third of parents in the U.S. (29%) have installed any kind of parental control software on their children’s devices.

“As internet usage becomes more integrated into children’s everyday lives, it is becoming a major challenge for parents to ensure their kids are staying safe online,” said Todd Helmbrecht, senior vice president of marketing, Kaspersky Lab North America. “In combination with educating children about the potential threats faced online, installing security solutions on children’s devices that offer parental controls is one of the best ways to keep kids safe in the digital world. Parental control software helps our youngest internet users steer clear of dangerous websites, avoid inappropriate content and responsibly manage their time online.”

To help protect children from online threats, Kaspersky Lab has introduced the next generation of Kaspersky Safe Kids. With the latest product updates, parents can block dangerous search requests on their children’s mobile devices, while children can see how much time they have left to work on computers and ask their parents for more time remotely.

Kaspersky Safe Kids is designed to block or warn children about potentially dangerous websites and applications. The Safe Search feature has been updated in the latest version of the software, allowing parents to hide certain content from their children’s search results on mobile devices, such as adult websites, violent content or alcohol and tobacco-related websites. Therefore, even if a child unwittingly enters a request in a search engine that will yield these kinds of results, those websites will be filtered out.

With Kaspersky Safe Kids, parents can set the amount of time that their child is allowed to spend on a device, and after this timeframe has elapsed, access to the device can be automatically blocked. In the updated version of the software, children can see how much time allowance they have left on their computers, and they can request additional time directly from the Safe Kids app. Parents can also see how much time their children have spent on devices through the “parental mode” of the Safe Kids application directly on their own smartphones or tablets.

To make it easier to communicate with the solution, the new Kaspersky Safe Kids is now also armed with a tutorial feature on desktops and a trial mode in which parents can freely test premium features for a week. Among the premium features offered are “child location,” which provides the ability to request a child’s location and establish location boundaries for specific times of day, including alerts if these boundaries are crossed by the child; and “social networks management,” where parents can receive detailed statistics on their child’s public social media activity.