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

Ignorance is Bliss

[Barondude]

How many of those people surveyed have PCs sending out SPAM behind their backs?

Safer than what?

[morgan_greywolf]

The Internet is safer than what? Skinny dipping in the Everglades after dark?

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.

Re:I must have missed something.

[Niten]

Because when you have a brazillion PCs to keep track of, maintaining any semblance of security becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.

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.

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.