‘Are You Cyber Savvy?’; Kaspersky Lab asks internet users
Kaspersky Lab wants to draw attention to this problem with a test that helps users evaluate their level of cyber savviness and understand if their behavior on the Internet is safe or not.
User safety in the digital environment depends on a number of factors. First of all,it depends on the user’s ability to make the right decisions. Your online habits can help protect your digital identity, money and personal data, or it could makeit all easy prey for criminals.
Internet users often do not recognize a potential threat whenthey encounter one. That is the result of testingconducted by Kaspersky Lab involving 18,000 people worldwide. The test sees respondents confronted with several potentially dangerous situations that occurregularly on the Internet when surfing the Web, downloading files or viewing social networking sites,for example. Each scenario offers a choice of several answers. Depending on the possible negative consequences, each answer is assigned a score –the safer the user’s choice, the higher the score, and vice versa.
Representatives of16 countries scored an average of 95 pointsout of a possible 150. This means they only chose the safe optionsin half of the hypothetical situations; in the remaining situations they exposed themselves to the risk of unpleasant consequences such as a confidential information leak,for example.
During testing only 24% of respondents were able to identify a genuine web page without also selectinga phishing (i.e. fake) page. Moreover, 58% of those surveyed selected only phishing sites designed to steal people’s credentials without choosing the genuine page. It was also found thaton receiving a suspicious email,every tenth user is ready to open the attached file without checking it – the equivalent of manually launching a malicious program in many cases. Another 19% woulddisable a security solution if it suddenly tried to prevent the installation of a program because itcould be dangerous.
“Self-preservation is an integral part of our existence. In the real world we know how to reduce the risk of money or property loss: we’velearnt about it from an early age. When we’re offline we’re always on guard, but when it comes to the Internet the self-preservation instinct often fails us. And,of course, today everything has a digital format: our personal life, intellectual property and money. All this requires that we adopt the same kind of responsibility as in real life, and the cost of making a mistake online can be just as high. That’s why we encourage everyone to evolve with technology and improve their cyber savviness,” warns David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
You can scan your device for malware or vulnerabilities with the help of Kaspersky Lab’s free tools available at http://free.kaspersky.com. To find out just how cyber savvy you are, visit https://blog.kaspersky.com/cyber-savvy-quiz/. More advice on safe online behavior is available athttps://blog.kaspersky.com/tag/cybersavvy.
