It Won’t Happen to Me

I came across an interesting report entitled “2010 MAAWG Email Security Awareness and Usage Report from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). The report was compiled from a January 2010 survey that the MAAWG conducted of more than 3,700 email users (who do not rely on an IT person to manage their email address) in 6 countries including Canada, US, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom and gives insight into the behaviors of respondents regarding email usage and computer viruses.

The survey’s key findings include:

• Almost half of those who opened spam did so intentionally. Many wanted to unsubscribe or complain to the sender (25%), to see what would happen (18%) or were interested in the product (15%).
• Overall, 11% of consumers have clicked on a link in spam, 8% have opened attachments, 4% have forwarded it and 4% have replied to spam.
• On average, 44% of users consider themselves somewhat experienced with email security. In Germany, 33% of users see themselves as an expert or very experienced, followed by around 20% in Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.A., 16% in Canada and just 8% in France.
• Men and email users under 35 years, the same demographic groups who tend to consider themselves more experienced with email security, are more likely to open or click on links or forward spam. Among email users under 35 years, 50% report having opened spam compared to 38% of those over 35. Younger users also were more likely to have clicked on a link in spam (13%) compared to less than 10% of older consumers.
• Consumers are most likely to hold their Internet or email service provider most responsible for stopping viruses and malware. Only 48% see themselves as most responsible, though in France this falls to 30% and 37% in Spain.
• Yet in terms of anti-virus effectiveness, consumers ranked themselves ahead of all others, except for anti-virus vendors: 56% of consumers rated their own ability to stop malware and 67% rated that of anti-virus vendors as very or fairly good. Government agencies, consumer advocacy agencies and social networking sites were among those rated most poorly.

Even though we, as a population, are becoming more technologically savvy, the report demonstrates we underestimate our vulnerability of a computer virus affecting us (i.e. It won’t happen to me), and we exaggerate the problem by not taking appropriate measures to reduce the spread of email viruses and other cyber attacks.