Study Shows Increase in Personal Info Security Awareness
An article review.
The Good News: Awareness Is Starting To Seep Through
A recent study commissioned by Experian’s ProtectMyID shows a positive trend in personal information security awareness. With the vast majority of people preparing and filing their taxes electronically, the digital dangers of malware, fraud, phishing and more are finding their way into the forefront of the minds of American taxpayers.
The survey included 1,000 US taxpayers, and it highlighted some encouraging trends.
- 81% are planning to file their taxes electronically, that’s an 8% increase from 2011.
- 55% are worried about identity theft resulting from doing their taxes.
- 16% are “unfamiliar with the concept of tax-related identity theft.”
- 50% are unaware of the Identity Protection Personal Identification Number (IP PIN) issued by the IRS.
The article goes on to make several good suggestions like researching your tax preparer or tax preparation software, using updated antivirus on your computer, and not using public unsecured wireless networks for confidential transactions. They offered some good reminders.
All in all, the study is reassuring. Security awareness is ever so slowing beginning to seep through to the public at large. So what does this mean for you? It means the recurrence of breach news is impacting our customer awareness. In Dan Hadaway’s 2015 trend article, he speaks to this new trend as “Awareness Training in All Directions,” and the new direction is “internal.” In other words, persons everywhere are starting to educate themselves, and THAT is good news!
More importantly, don’t you want your team to be a step ahead of your customers? So are your employees going to learn about InfoSec best practices from you or from your customers?
Click Here To Read the Full Article
The above is what we call an “Article Review.” It is part of our attempt to help our readers find excellent reading materials to back up important technology risk management concepts. We try not to include articles that are merely news or additional news about mainstream issues. Instead, we try to highlight articles that our “typical clients” should be sure to read, or that are about concepts “outside the mainstream media.” infotex does not intend to endorse views represented by the writers of the articles we review, nor do we try to keep our Clients aware of EVERYTHING. For example, if a particular story concept is being reported upon in many different media sources, infotex usually chooses to ignore the story concept altogether, unless we can find a “unique take” on the story concept.
Original article by Jason Bramwell of AccountingWeb.com.
