While the world wide web space certainly provides children with wonderful social and developmental

RELATED ARTICLES Internet revolution bypasses rural India

opportunities, the Internet can also be fraught with nasty surprises — if parents don’t keep a watchful eye. So says Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of IT security solutions in the world and the largest anti-virus company in Europe.

“Cybercriminals and scammers of all kinds are active across the Internet. The threats they pose can also affect children as they surf the web and use social networking sites, chat, instant messaging and email,” the latest report from Kaspersky Lab on ‘Safety of Children on the Internet’said.

A spokesperson of Kaspersky Lab in India explained that the danger stems from the fact that children are curious, and there's therefore a fair chance that a child will want to see what kinds of games adults play. The children will also at some point search the Internet to find out more about what their peers are whispering about at school.

In this connection, the report said, “Cybercriminals can use black hat SEO techniques to push unwanted or dangerous links to the top of search results. Often, these links not only lead to websites with questionable content (typically, these are fraudulent pages or adult content websites), but can also be malicious.”

Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include characteristics like breaking search engine rules and regulations, creating a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site and unethically presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Typically, kids love social networking sites — venues where they can socialize, plan get-togethers, play games, and view videos and photos. The popularity of social sites is also a draw for cybercriminals. And Kaspersky Lab report said, “Using social networks today is a huge risk for children, since they do not have sufficient life experience to reliably distinguish between the fake and the genuine. Parents should never forget this!”