Reports about cybercriminals taking advantage of lax computer protection are increasing in frequency, but a study reveals that too few American users adopt the necessary measures to secure access to their information.

A research carried out in September by antivirus vendor Bitdefender shows poor security practices for users in the US despite being aware of the online risks they expose themselves to.

Men are more security-aware

The study took into consideration the existence of an anti-malware product and supplementary protection solutions on a computer system, adoption of additional authentication methods for accessing online accounts, and the measures to protect when connecting through insecure WiFi networks.

Senior malware analyst Bogdan Botezatu from Bitdefender says that VPN (virtual private network) and two-factor authentication (2FA) are technologies that enjoy lower popularity levels than they should, being used by less than one in ten of the Americans participating in the study.

It appears that men aged 33-44 are more security-aware as far as their computer is concerned and use additional solutions for keeping safe, relying on VPN when on public networks, enabling 2FA to fend off unauthorized access to online accounts, and backing up their files.

At the opposite end are females aged 18-29, who are “the least interested in securing their computers or smart devices.”
Fear of forgetting passwords makes users vulnerable

According to the research, which had a sample base of about 1,000 respondents, recycling passwords is common practice among US users, 30% of North Americans employing the same countersign, or slight variations of them, for multiple services.

Botezatu said that the motivation behind this practice is fear of forgetting the passwords unless they are re-used. A password manager would eliminate the need to keep track of the protective character strings and would offer the possibility to enable strong ones.

This exposes them to unnecessary risks when one of the services is compromised, because cybercriminals often try credentials on multiple services in order to maximize their profits by compromising as many accounts as possible.

“To make matters worse, only 7.2 percent of Americans have enabled two-factor authentication mechanisms to safeguard their online identities,” the analyst says in a blog post.

On the other hand, more than half of the respondents are worried about the safety of their online banking accounts and their identity.
A little more protection goes a long way

"The study we carried out reveals once again that computer users do not take the proper measures to safeguard their accounts or the workstations they use to connect to the Internet."

Given the enormous amount of data breaches in the past years, reusing passwords is a very bad idea: once a service gets breached and your password ends up being published, all your connected accounts can fall into the cyber criminals' hands," Botezatu said in an email correspondence.

Murphy’s law says that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong;” this can happen at any time, but users have the power to minimize the online security risks and thus delay the possibility of compromise by adopting the current minimum protection standards.