Hot on the heels of Safer Internet Day a new European wide survey conducted by Eurobarometer was released today. The survey asked various questions of people from across the EU on how cybercrime has impacted on their lives. The survey makes for interesting reading, in particular in relation to the data focusing on Ireland.

One of the problems in trying to gauge the impact of cybercrime here in Ireland is that we often are at the mercy of vendor reports. While these vendor reports do well to highlight certain issues, they inevitably are biased towards the services or products the vendor is promoting.

The other problem we have is that more independent reports on cybercrime tend to focus on the US, the EU, or the United Kingdom. So data pertinent to Ireland is often difficult to get.

So this report from Eurobarometer is a welcome change to the typical surveys we get. While it does focus on the consumer experience it does highlight some areas of concern, in particular peoples’ habits on password reuse across systems and not installing anti-virus software on their devices. From a corporate point of view, those consumers are also employees within our organisations so bad habits they generate in their own personal lives may transfer over into their business lives.

One way to tackle that issue is to implement effective security awareness programs. At BH Consulting we can develop bespoke security awareness courses for your requirements and/or provide you with state of the art CBT training in the form of Securing the Human.

Some of the key figures that jumped out at me were;

• 57% of Irish people admit to opening emails from people they don’t know
• Only 26% of Irish Internet users regulalry change their passwords
• 75% of Irish people surveyed use the same password across different sites and online services.
• 9% of Irish Internet users have been the victims of identity theft
• 10% of Irish Internet users were the victims bank card or other online banking fraud
• 7% were victims of Ransomware where they had to pay criminals in order to restore access to their own device

The full report is available from the Eurobarometer site (PDF file)