A cyber-protection product company has conducted a survey on social media of smartphone usage ahead of the Mobile World Congress. According to ESET: almost ten percent of surveyed users had their phone lost or stolen in the last 12 months, slightly more than 29 percent do not lock their smartphone, and almost 20 percent do not backup content of their smartphone at all. How safely do people use their smartphone?
9.7 per cent had their phone lost or stolen
19.7 per cent do not back up at all, 35.7 per cent do so sometimes or irregularly
29.3 per cent of those surveyed do not lock their phone, 55.3 per cent use PIN
64.9 per cent do use somewhere and some form of second authentication
The aim of the survey of around five hundred smartphone users on social media (conducted mainly in February 2015) was to gather data on mobile security. Raphael Labaca Castro, one of ESET speakers at Mobile World Congress, offers his tips on how to stay safer online. “For Android users, a security solution is essential, as last year we observed record number of threats for this platform – including the first ever file encrypting ransomware discovered by our research labs,” says Raphael Labaca Castro.
According to Castro, another must to protect against any damage is to regularly back up the data stored on a smartphone. Based on the firm’s survey 19.7 percent of users do not actually back up data at all and 35.7 percent only do so sometimes (14.7 per cent do so daily, 19.9 per cent weekly and 10 per cent monthly).
The IT product firm say that one of the best protection tools against physical breaches of phones is locking the device (security software with Anti-Theft can help locate it as well). However, 29.3 percent do not lock the phone or screen against unwanted access at all with a majority – 55.3 percent – doing so with a PIN number (12.5 per cent use fingerprint and 3 per cent face detector).
One of the best ways to protect access to business networks as well as personal emails is to use 2-factor authentication. Here we can report a welcome trend, 64.9 percent of those surveyed already used some form of second authentication for online services (e.g. via text message). This can be especially important for services like online banking which is accessed by 53 percent of surveyed users. In addition, the survey highlighted the importance of protecting the “cloud” of smartphone users, with 26.9 percent already using solely these cloud services and 23.1 percent saving the data both locally and in the cloud.
Note: This survey was conducted via ESET social media pages among around five hundred social media users using smartphones, surveyed during January 29 – February 17, 2015.
