Users Worldwide Feel Internet Is 'Safer'

buzzardsbay writes "Baseline Magazine is reporting on a study by Cisco that teases out the differing attitudes about online security among users across the globe. For instance, remote workers worldwide think the internet is getting safer ... except the folks in Italy and Germany. These folks also have a lot of faith in their corporate IT departments as 51 percent said their work computers are more secure than their personal PCs, and nearly half (45 percent) believe they are more vulnerable to malware and hacks when they're working outside their corporate perimeter. Irony of ironies, the Brazilians hold Net security in the highest regard."

Comments

what does safe mean?

[sam_paris]

You are only as safe as the measures YOU employ to protect yourself. Your email may be hosted by the most secure company in the world but if your password is "password" or "firstnamelastname" or "123456789" etc then all their security measures are meaningless.

Likewise, if you're running unpatched versions of XP you could have the most secure password ever yet it's meaningless when you have a rootkit with a keystroke logger that's sending your password to a script kiddy in Russia.

Perhaps people "feel" safer because the marketing departments of certain companies... (Microsoft) tell them they are..

Re:what does safe mean?

[Phylarr]

I think this story is meaningless without someone explaining what was meant by "safe." Did they ask people if they felt safer from malware, or did they ask if they felt safer when buying something from an online retailer? These are very different forms of safety.

Also of note is that the article consistently confused the issue of whether people said they felt safer or whether more people said they felt safe.

On a related note, according TFA, France holds net security in the highest regard, not Brazil. Brazil showed the greatest improvement in people who hold it in high regard. I think. The article was so poorly written that I can't even say for sure if that's what it was saying.

The Internet is Vast...

[nonsequitor]

and getting vaster every day. Most security is worthless. Its good enough to prevent a majority of threats from getting through, sometimes. The only thing protecting users is the size of the internet combined with the fact that most of them do not have anything of value stored on their computers. The only thing Joe Sixpack has that Evil Hacker wants is his credit card number, which let's face it, is not enough to retire off of. The only other things that can be taken from Joe Sixpack are his resources; CPU and bandwidth. The net result is you would still have to grind out a living as an Evil Hacker, or get into freelance corporate espionage. So yes, the internet seems safer, mainly because its bigger, not because it is technologically more capable of stopping the bad guys from getting you.

(I apologize for rambling, I'm sick in bed hopped up on meds)

Re:OMFG!

[Kjella]

Users worldwide are idiots. The net is drastically more hostile now than it was 10 years ago. right now you have so much crap, scams, fraud and other nasty running about only a drooling moron would think... Actually I found that there was more such crap 10 years ago, when the Internet economy was supposed to turn everything up-side down and gullible people fell for it in droves because is was new and unknown. And most of all, the tools were crap. There were Outlook worms that'd spread by looking at it, RPC worms, IIS exploits (ok this is getting Microsoft-bashing but they were the dominating software supplier), these days it seems they need to sucker the user into doing something stupid. Plus these days you at least have privilidge separation so you can try to sandbox things.

These days the ones that were once bitten are twice shy, and if you run a decently updated box with no random cracks from the Intarwebs chances are slim you'll have any problems. Just recently I read that the online banks were starting to decline proposals to increase security - it was rare enough that simply paying up if people got swindled made more sense. In short, I think the people left that are getting suckered for the most part are the ones that'd get suckered by phone, by mail, by fax or any other way you'd get in touch with them.

Random Thoughts

[milsoRgen]

While I feel the internet has gotten a whole lot shittier with laws encroaching onto our once pristine wild wild west style play ground. I personally don't feel any less safe. There are risks out there of course, just has there has been for a long time now. But by practicing the same techniques I have for ages I'm fairly confident in my box.

If anything I might be slightly more confident as these days. I've always been a hardware geek and as case mods have come down in price and the software to support them has matured, I now have instantaneous access to system resource utilization and temperatures through various means that allow me to gauge my computer utilization with a glance, contrast that to the task at hand and you know when things are being accessed outside of your control. The cost of a hardware based SPI firewall is within anyones range. Also memory prices are so cheap you can afford the extra 128+ required to leave a software based firewall, anti-virus and network logger running.

And I always delve into windows to ensure maximum resources are available for gaming. So along the way I get to know windows on a level most never do. So all it takes is a quick glance at which processes are running to keep me feeling okay about things.

Really the only thing that worries me are rootkits, but I ran those scanners once in a while. However I don't really know how much faith I should be putting in them... Either way a competent user shouldn't have to much to worry about.

With that being said, I don't think I would put quite as much faith in network security at work, granted the admin's are paid and trained to do what they do. But they also, generally, have an increased workload and many other responsibilities.

Re:OMFG!

[PitaBred]

You haven't done much end-user support, have you? People still install Bonzi Buddy, etc. because they want a furry, cute "friend" or whatever screensavers they can find, and click yes to every prompt because they know that way things will work.

The Internet isn't much safer, the users are just as clueless, and water is still wet. The only thing that's improved is defense against automated attacks, which while a very good thing, is still just the tortilla on the enchilada.