Security Watch | Matt Hines » Badware not pushing users offline

March 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Badware not pushing users offline

TAGS: Security

Malware, spam and a litany of social engineering schemes may haunt nearly every corner of the Web, but that's not stopping most Americans from feeling confident in their ability to do business on the Internet safely, according to a new paper published by StopBadware.org.

The Harvard Law School anti-malware project points out this "security paradox" in its latest report, released just a day before of one of its lead researchers is slated to testify before federal regulators on the growing complexity and financial impact of online threats.

Maxim Weinstein, who manages the StopBadware.org team at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will speak on the continued evolution of phishing -- which Consumer Reports estimates to have accounted for $2.1 billion in related fraud in the last year alone -- before the Federal Trade Commission in Washington on Tuesday.

The new poll, conducted for StopBadware by Zogby International, finds that 88 percent of the Americans interviewed in the study feel secure when using the Web, and that some 84 percent of respondents believe that they have sufficient resources on hand to make informed decisions about protecting their privacy and security online.

In an interesting demographic twist, younger Americans appear to view the Web as even more secure than their older peers -- sort of like driving a car, and you wonder if a lack of experience plays a similar roll as it does with youthful drivers -- with nearly 50 percent of survey respondents under age 30 indicating in the study that the feel "very safe" online.

Only 25 percent of those respondents 65 and older replied the same way -- although to be fair one could similarly guess that older folks are just far more careful than their younger counterparts in general. I myself have older relatives who appear to believe that the Internet was designed by the devil himself for the sake of spreading pornography and enabling widespread terrorism.

StopBadware leaders said that the rift is likely emblematic of the fact that younger users have grown accustomed to having the Web in their lives starting at an earlier age.

"Young people who have grown up in a digital society treat the Internet as part of their world, not as a separate entity with different rules from the physical world," John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center said. "To digital natives, asking if they feel safe online is akin to asking if they feel safe in their own community."

The apparent Internet security paradox appears to transcend most issues of geography, age, politics, and gender, however, based on the replies of the 6,678 Americans Zogby polled in February 2008, as most deferred to some level of online safety.

Perhaps even more disconcerting than the notion that people seem to feel secure on the Web is the fact that few are taking the needed steps to best protect themselves -- at least according to other research reports.

In making its point, StopBadware highlighted the fact that only 24 percent of those people participating in a recent report published by AV vendor McAfee and the National Cyber Security Alliance employ a firewall and update their anti-virus and anti-spyware systems on a regular basis.

Along with other research totals that indicate that more Americans than ever are going online -- such as the Pew Internet Project's most recent estimate that 70 percent of U.S. citizens are Internet users, up from just 15 percent in 1995 -- and StopBadware predicts things are only going to get worse in terms of overall financial losses.

Sixty percent of those people responding to the Pew study said they remain unworried about how much of their personal information resides on the Web, with 61 percent of the adults interviewed for that report indicating that they do not feel compelled to control their digital image to protect themselves from attack.

Until drastic measures are taken and more Americans wake up to the problem of online threats, it appears that online security threats will only intensify, said StopBadware's Weinstein.

"Americans see themselves as safe online, even as we see an ongoing trend of organized criminal elements using the Internet to target unsuspecting users," he said.

Posted by Matt Hines on March 31, 2008 09:15 AM

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