A new report by cyber-security firm Kaspersky claimed that 51 percent of professionals are using their work-from-home devices to access porn globally – 18 percent and 33 percent of whom are watching sexually explicit content on their company-given and personal-cum-work computers respectively.
According to Kaspersky, this could expose the professionals to the risk of their devices becoming infected by malware.
“This can though potentially lead to malware infections if employees do not pay attention to the resources and websites they visit,” the Russian cyber security firm said in its report.
In its findings, PornHub revealed that its website previously gained the majority of its clients from India during the night, but since the lockdown, the adult website has recorded a surge in Indian visitors during all hours of the day as well.
A disturbing trend in Indians accessing porn during the lockdown also noted a spike in searches concerning key words like “child porn”, “sexy child” and “teen sex videos”. The trend was reported by the Child Protection Fund – one of the largest child protection organisations in South Asia -- which keeps tracks of online data.
“The overall demand for child pornography was an average of 5 million per month in 100 cities on the public web during December 2019, which has now spiked. The report reveals up to 200 percent increase in demand for violent content which shows children 'choking', 'bleeding' and 'tortured'”, the India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) had noted.
This comes despite the Indian government’s claims of having blocked over 9,000 porn sites in the country. In February, Indian Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told the lower house of the Parliament that the government had banned at least 9,063 websites featuring adult content in 2019.
In 2018, the Indian Department of Telecommunications told internet service providers to ban 827 websites for hosting pornographic content. In a bid to access the prohibited content, downloads of virtual private network (VPN) software increased by 405 percent since October 2018, Global Mobile VPN had reported.