Keep Online Predators Away From Your Kids
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Under mounting public pressure, MySpace.com had little choice but to hand over to state authorities information on registered sex offenders who might cruise the Internet to lure unsuspecting youngsters.  But more remains to be done to protect the vulnerable from online predators.
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The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
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Blog: Two public service ads warn teens about the threats to putting photos and personal information online.
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U.S. parents are more worried about the amount of time their kids spend watching television or meeting friends on Internet social networks than about sex or alcohol abuse, according to a new study.
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By Anonymous  WAN lessons learned  Plus: How to hide your online footprints.
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Amy Tiemann wonders if the online world can be both safe and commercial-free for kids.
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By J. Scott Trubey< Staff Writer  The Columbia County Library will play host Thursday night to a program  for parents wanting to know more about the dangers of online communities  such as MySpace.com.
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A children's advocacy group launched the first-of-its-kind free online safety resource to help parents and educators protect youths from being exploited on the Internet.
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Police launched a Web site on Tuesday to  warn children as young as eight about the dangers of putting  their personal details on social networking sites such as  MySpace and Bebo.
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CHICAGO _ For the first time, Facebook.com is facing the realities of being used by would-be predators.
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By Randy Myers, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.  May 29--In hopes of making the Internet a safer place for children, concerned parents tap into a multitude of resources.
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Social-networking sites are all the rage with kids. Now a lawsuit accuses the most popular one of not doing enough to protect them from predators
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The typical online sexual predator is not someone posing as a teen to lure unsuspecting victims into face-to-face meetings that result in violent rapes, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
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Chris Kelly describes and defends the user-tracking Beacon function, handling sexual predators online, and balancing privacy and community.
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By Anne D'Innocenzio  As kids keep getting plugged into the Internet, toy makers are following them online.
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By Fergus Sheppard media correspondent  IT IS the secret language of the internet that paedophiles exploit to groom children under the noses of their parents.
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In today's world of Web 2.0, where social  network and user-generated content reign, and where the Internet is  available from your phone, your PSP and your Nintendo Wii, the need to  protect children from the worst while directing them to the best of the  Web is more important than ever.