But answer yourself to the following questions and see if your child is having a safe online browsing while you are solving everyday problems.

• Is your child online late at night?
• Is your child creating profiles on social networks or using microblogging services?
• Is your child alone for most of the time during his or her online sessions?
• Is your child spending the majority of his or her time online in chat rooms?
• Does your child minimize the screen on the computer when you walk by?
• Do you notice several programs showing in the task bar at the bottom of the screen, but no programs active on the monitor? This is a sure sign that something your child does not want you to see is hiding in the task bar.
• Do you know all your child online friends or it has in list unknown persons?
• Did your child give private information to strangers?
• Is your child hesitant to talk about or evasive in describing his or her online experiences?
• Is your child more addicted to Internet than playing outside with his friends?
• Is your child spending lots of time playing games? (This might take to game addiction).
• Is your child exposed to violent, pornographic material on the Internet?
• What is his general mindset? Is he a risk taker? Is he too trusting of other people?
• Does he communicate with you about his life in general, including school and activities?

If you have answered to all these questions than you definitely came up to a conclusion regarding your child online activity. If you think that your child might be at risk that you should take some action. There are lost of solutions, but the first think you have to do is to talk with your child. Explain to your child what Internet is and expose him the dangers he might encounter.

What people don’t understand is that the best way to protect child is through education. And to support my saying I can give you this link and read by yourself what experts are saying about online education. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2007/07/23/tech-online-predators.html)

There are also other solutions. For example you could install on your child’s computer parental control software that will block or restrict his activity. These applications are very useful and your child will only be able to browse the web at specific hours, on specific web pages, without the risk of being exposed to inappropriate content.
If you want another alternative, you can choose to hire a nanny. Of course this solution is more expensive and involves more resources. But when it comes about your child’s security nothing is more important.

From my point of view the best defense against online dangers is education, but I guess each parent know what’s better for his family.

But as we are no more in eighteen century and Sherlock Holmes is not here to solve any case our generation must do it by his own. Anyway it’s hard to imagine Holmes spying hackers, solving an e-crime and catching spam attackers. Things have moved forward and the global information society is rapidly evolving among with the cyberspace that has opened the door to criminals of all sorts.

Nowadays Internet and computers can lead to committing crime, online thievery, spam attacks, different online attacks, and human trafficking. But on the other side they can also provide essential evidence of all these online crimes. Electronic records such as computer network logs, e-mails, word-processing files, and picture files increasingly provide important evidence on e-crime cases, online thievery, hackers attack and any other offensive cyber activity.

Different services, associations (http://www.ophea.net/cybercops.cfm) and specific software were developed and created in order to eliminate the online threats and to assure a safe browsing and a secure online environment. There are programs specifically created for educating children about risks and safety issues associated with Internet use (http://www.otal.umd.edu/uupractice/children/). If you want to learn more on how to protect your child online, if you are looking for proper websites for children or you want to report cyber and IP crime than please find below some resources in order to find a solution and get you a helping hand:
http://www.cybercrime.gov/reporting.htm
http://www.kidsites.com/
http://applicationblocker.com/child-abuse-statistics.html

And as a proper ending for this post I found the right Holmes’ saying: “The cardinal rule of criminal detection was carved in stone more than a century ago.] It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence, … It biases the judgment.”