Converge ICT Solutions Inc. joins the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the ongoing battle against Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children (OSAEC). The Annual IWF report for 2023 cites the alarming trend of children from three to six years old who are manipulated into illicit acts while left alone with their digital devices.
This underscores our advocacy in Converge for the safe use of the internet and the paramount responsibility of parents to monitor their children’s online activities. According to the report, some 275,000 URLs were found by IWF to contain child sexual abuse imagery, having links to the imagery or advertising it. This is an 8% increase from 2022, which is a sad and distressing fact.
IWF is one of the staunchest partners of Converge in combating this phenomenon as the company is provided by IWF with a URL list of online child sexual abuse webpages for easier tagging and blocking, and an ‘Image Hash List’, a database of codes representing the illicit content, which can then be matched with content on Converge’s network and removed.
This knowledge sharing has been crucial in efforts to block this content in the Converge network. With their help, we at Converge have blocked 12 billion access attempts to illicit and harmful web addresses at the end of 2023.
For 2023 alone, Converge blocked a staggering 9.8 billion requests to be connected to illegal sites. This reflects a more than 400-percent spike from the nearly 1.9 billion requests blocked by the company during the previous year.
We look forward to continuing the fight this 2024 as these disturbing new trends emerge. It is our fervent hope that our joint efforts will make a dent in curbing OSAEC if not globally, at least here in the Philippines which has been cited as a global hotspot for OSAEC.
