ASACP, the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection, has noticed a major surge in the use of its CP Reporting Tipline during the COVID crisis.
ASACP’s Executive Director Tim Henning said that over the past 30 days since lockdowns took effect in many countries, a range of international Tiplines have experienced a drastically increased volume of reports from those regions — including a 25 percent increase in reporting volume to ASACP’s Tipline since mid-March.
The ASACP Tipline has received and processed well over 1 million reports since its inception in 1996 and is widely lauded for its work with international law enforcement agencies combatting child exploitation. The association also offers, free to operators, the award winning Restricted To Adults (RTA) meta-labeling system which helps to increase the accuracy and efficacy of parental filtering systems. This combination of efforts by adult industry, mainstream technology companies and parents all come together to effectively prevent minors from accessing billions of pages of adult-oriented content online.
“Children are spending much more time online due to lockdowns and restrictions in many countries around the world,” Henning explained. “They are spending more time online for school and e-learning programs, and entertainment — and this extra exposure increases their vulnerability to predators and malicious content.”
It is another sign of the times, as the coronavirus pandemic’s effects spread into the world of online child protection.
“Parents should be vigilant and take advantage of the myriad amount of free parental filtering tools for everything from browsers and apps to device and ISP-level filtering,” Henning advised and noted that proactive parental involvement, rather than governmental overreach, is the key to protecting children online. “Parents can take simple steps to ensure that their children remain as safe as possible in their daily digital lives — especially in this unique time when the digital aspect of their lives dominates their days.”
In addition to the threats to children online, Henning noted that there has been an increase in cyberattacks worldwide as hackers seek to take advantage of the pandemic.
“ASACP experiences cyberattacks regularly, both to our websites and database systems, and has experienced an increase in these hacking attempts over the past 30 days,” Henning revealed. “Recently, we had an attack on our database systems that lasted for two days before being brought under control, with more than 15,000 brute-force login attempts conducted during these two days.”
“As an organization dedicated to protecting the use of technology, ASACP has never experienced a successful breach in its two dozen years of operation,” Henning concluded. “There are a lot of bad actors that would love to end our mission of keeping children out of and away from adult entertainment, but thanks to the ongoing support of our sponsors, we can dedicate the resources required to keep our systems running — and the world’s children safer.”
To learn how your company can help protect itself by protecting children, email tim@asacp.org.
