More people are concerned about having information stolen online than being a victim of cyber crime.
According to a survey of 2,000 people in the USA and UK by Centrify, 79 per cent are concerned about identity theft, with one in four people having been a victim. Speaking to IT Security Guru, Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify said that this is an area of high awareness for people as a quarter of people have experienced some sort of fraud or identity theft, especially as it has taken over ten hours to be resolved and over a month to be “restablised”.
He said: “A lot has to do with passwords being stolen. We found that 25 per cent of people share passwords across different websites and the bad guys capture them and use them.
Kemp in particular praised the efforts of Facebook to find and alert users when their credentials were harvested, and the effort of Troy Hunt to establish the website “Have I been Pwned”.
He said: “We need to look at multi-factor authentication, such as smartphones with TouchID technologies and social applications.
“The issue is it takes someone like Google or Apple to come up with a better way, but you run the risk as someone may not even have a phone. Most retailers are willing to offer less security because it results in higher transactions, and there is theft and fraud but it is overridden.”
The survey found that 26 per cent of respondents with a high “digital footprint” were concerned about losing credit card information or having their email account spammed, showing that those who spend the most time online were less concerned about their identity being stolen.
Kemp said: “They have a larger footprint and they are more confident in comparison to those who are more scared. But the reality is that there is awareness across the board and the statistics show that one in four expect some sort of fraud and a lot relates to passwords and accounts.”
