Parenting Pointers: Survey Alert: There's a 1 in 3 Chance Your Family's Internet Is Vulnerable to Hacking

Moms, we know just how hard it is to tend to your kids. After a long 8 hour day, you have to worry about feeding your children and making sure they’re happy. With all of these priorities, your home internet connection might be the least of your concerns.

But consider some of these shocking statistics:

American kids spend 6 to 9 hours per day on the Internet, not including homework time. 9 in 10 teens go on the Internet with their mobile devices, and more than half of children ages 8 to 12 own cellphones.

Meanwhile, 96 million Americans have had their Internet network, email, or computer hacked or compromised. That’s according to online phone and Internet security company Ooma.com’s [www.ooma.com] Internet Security Report—a national survey of 1,000 Americans.

As one might guess, looking at cat memes (eg, browsing the Internet) is the main culprit behind compromised networks. 54% of the population has accidentally visited a website that infected their computer with a virus. This shows a lack of awareness of which websites are phishing for personal information or contain malware even on the part of sophisticated Internet users.

Now imagine how high that statistic jumps for children on the Internet.

It’s not hard to see why parents want more control over where their kids go online. 38 million American parents wish they could block access to certain websites for their kids. What do they want to restrict? Inappropriate or explicit images would be blocked from appearing on search results, of course. But parents could also prevent kids from visiting certain websites that might compromise a family device. That’s one less thing to worry about when your children are surfing the web behind closed doors!  

The Ooma.com survey simply quantifies the problem mothers and their children have always faced when they browsed. But the sheer size of these numbers suggests the need for preventative measures. Multi-device Internet security is particularly important now that a single network can support multiple devices—you need to be able to protect both your children and yourself. Ooma's Zscaler-powered, DNS-based cloud security platform [http://www.ooma.com/home-internet-security/] updates thousands of times per day to ensure effective protection. You can take a deep breath knowing your children won’t be directly compromising your home network hundreds of times a day. And those cat videos can be streamed worry-free after all.