Comparing how security experts and non-experts stay safe online

[+Warwagon MVC]

Today, you can find more online security tips in a few seconds than you could use in a lifetime. While this collection of best practices is rich, it’s not always useful; it can be difficult to know which ones to prioritize, and why.

Questions like ‘Why do people make some security choices (and not others)?’ and ‘How effectively does the security community communicate its best practices?’ are at the heart of a new paper called, “...no one can hack my mind”: Comparing Expert and Non-Expert Security Practices” that we’ll present this week at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.

This paper outlines the results of two surveys—one with 231 security experts, and another with 294 web-users who aren’t security experts—in which we asked both groups what they do to stay safe online. We wanted to compare and contrast responses from the two groups, and better understand differences and why they may exist.

Experts’ and non-experts’ top 5 security practices

Here are experts’ and non-experts’ top security practices, according to our study. We asked each participant to list 3 practices:

One thing I took away with glancing at the research paper is the non experts love their antivirus, they think they will never get a virus if they run Antivirus. On the other hand they don't do updates.

On the other hand experts patch patch patch, and feel AV is a false sense of security

Personally my feeling is patch patch patch, and stop anything untrusted from automatically running on my machine with out my say so, via white-listing..along with some from of AV. The one I use is both a whitelisting app and a cloud AV.

Read the rest of the bog at the link below.

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/07/new-research-comparing-how-security.html

You can find the full research paper here

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2015/soups15-paper-ion.pdf

Edited August 1, 2015 by warwagon

[exotoxic]

Apparently I'm a security expert

White listing doesn't really work for regular users because its all next, next next, yes, yes, yes, with no reading or understanding of what's happening.

[+Warwagon MVC]

Apparently I'm a security expert

White listing doesn't really work for regular users because its all next, next next, yes, yes, yes, with no reading or understanding of what's happening.

Exactly, it to them it would be worthless, for us it's fantastic!

Edited August 4, 2015 by warwagon