MOST of us wouldn’t cross the street without looking both ways, yet a recent study shows that many people would do something just as risky when they are online.
The September 2015 study “Are You Cyber Savvy?” by the security company Kaspersky surveyed 18,000 Internet users from 16 countries—including 1,394 from the Philippines—to learn about their online habits and to see if they could make the right decisions about security and recognize a threat when they encountered one.
Respondents were asked to answer a series of 33 questions and scored according to Kaspersky’s scale, with scores over 137 being the lowest level of risk and scores below 75 reflecting very dangerous online behavior.
The results showed that a significant number of users were unable to identify an online threat or adequately protect themselves, yet were overly confident about their security. In fact, Kaspersky found dangerous behavior in eight areas: surfing, digital identity protection, data protection, money protection, social media activity, applications usage and self protection.
To see if users could distinguish between a fake and a genuine page, Kaspersky asked the respondents to choose one of four offered web pages on which they would freely enter their personal information. The respondents could choose more than one page, but in fact, three out of four pages were screen shots of phishing pages.
Only 24 percent or one in four users could recognize the genuine page without choosing a phishing page as well. Moreover, while specifying the web pages on which they were ready to enter their data, 58 percent of users only chose the fake sites.
Filipino users fared even more poorly in this regard. When were shown a genuine Facebook log-in page and three fakes that merely looked like Facebook, nine out of 10 could not distinguish the real page from the phishing sites. Only 11 percent—compared to the global 24 percent–chose only the genuine website.
“These results suggests that majority of the Internet users are careless and trust easily,” said Jimmy Fong, Kaspersky Lab Southeast Asia’s channel sales director in a press release.
As one of the countries with the largest number of Facebook users, the Philippines is an attractive target for cyber criminals who use phishing attacks to steal personal information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details.
“Filipinos should really be more careful,” Fong said. “One wrong click can cost them their identity, their privacy, and even their money.”
The Kaspersky survey highlighted other forms of risky online behavior as well.
A third of all respondents said they would download an .exe file thinking it was an audio file, and thus open themselves to a malicious software.
When generating a password, only 38 percent of users thought of a new and more difficult password, while 14 percent of those surveyed always use only one password. These findings showed that 62 percent of respondents are at risk, because the leak of one password may lead to the simultaneous crack of several accounts.
The older the respondent, the greater the willingness to create a new and complicated password, Kaspersky found. Only a third of young people are ready to come up with a more complex password each time. Among older users this figure goes up to more than half.
On the other hand, older users rely less on their memory to remember their passwords and often choose the simplest—and most unsafe—methods of storing them like writing them down on a piece of paper, or saving them on the browser or on their mobile phones.
Some 29 percent of respondents believe no precautions are needed when buying online.
In the use of social networking sites, risky behavior was rife.
Twelve percent of users are ready to add friends on social networking sites indiscriminately, and another 31 percent said they would add strangers as friends if they had friends in common. One quarter of the respondents said they would click on a link received from a friend with no question, leaving themselves open to phishing sites and malicious software.
Putting their privacy—and perhaps even their own safety–at grave risk, three in 10 respondents were ready to share their posts, location, and information about their private life with everyone.
There is ample proof that dangers abound in the online world. How cyber savvy are you? You can find out by taking the test at https://blog.kaspersky.com/cyber-savvy-quiz/
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