Who is Most Likely to get Hacked – New Statistics Show who’s Going to be Hacked

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Transcript

TTWCP-DAILY-65_2017-04-13_Who-is-Most-Likely-to-get-Hacked

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/13/2017

Who is Most Likely to get Hacked – New Statistics Show who’s Going to be Hacked

Craig Peterson: Do you think you’re safe from ransomware because you’re smart. Because you know plenty about it, right? You’ve read the articles. You’ve seen the TV features on it. You’ve listened to my show. So you know, right? Well we’re going to talk today about ransomware and bring a little sanity to this because people who are going to be affected the most by ransomware aren’t the people you think they are. New study out there. We’re going to get into it right now.

(TTWCP EARWORM)

You know, when you think about the identity theft victim and you think about ransomware and who the victims are, you’ve probably got someone that comes in mind, right? It’s that old person and it’s that crazy lady, you know, that has all the cats. There’s all kinds of stereotypes about this, you know, that are going to come straight to mind. But a new study that just came out from CBT Nugget, identified who the people are that are most likely to get nailed by some of this nastiness out there. You know, and that includes identity theft, it’s phishing, it’s hacks, it’s all of the security problems we have today. Now you know that I do a lot of security work in my business. I train people. We have training programs. We have monthly little emails where we’re trying to hack the employees of the company to see whether or not they’re paying attention, right? We do all of that sort of stuff. Well, the victims of our, you know, intrigue here of our white hat hacking are about the same as CBT has shown here. These are the people who call themselves tech savvy, in other words, the people you think who should know better are the people who are actually more likely to fall prey to various types of these hacks. Of the identity theft. Of everything else. In fact, this study showed that these people are about 18% more likely to fall prey to identity theft than just the normal people.

Now that’s kind of interesting because many people look at it and say, you know, highly educated people are going to be better with computers. They’re going to understand how to use them better. And they’re going to be less likely to click on those links. And that’s how so much of it happens, right? People who have an advanced degree you think are people who are smarter about these stuff. But just like we’ve heard so many times and seen so many times, just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing. And so we, as business owners, have to be pretty careful here because formal education really has very little to do with them understanding cybersecurity and has very little to do with being hacked here. We’ve got to really impress on them the importance of cybersecurity and all of the stuff they need to do.

So the study revealed a number of stats that kind of surprised people about identity theft, about hacking victims, frankly. But the number one thing is something that I’ve been harping on forever that just drives me crazy and that is that people just don’t care. We’ve talked before about business who look at it as a financial situation. It’s cheaper for us not to put in place the security we need. And then if we get hacked, to recover and even to pay recompense. It’s still cheaper to do, right? They just don’t care. They admit that they’re just too lazy and they also said they don’t want to be inconvenienced by online security requirements and I’ve seen that time and time again. Because we go ahead and we said ok, here’s what we should do here. We’re going to block access to certain classifications of websites. We’re going to not allow certain types of stuff to be downloaded from the internet because it’s dangerous. Ultimately it could cause you to lose your whole business. And it shocks me sometimes at the pushback even for the most basic stuff that we are trying to block. Where the company says well, you know, my employees are complaining they can’t get their work done. Which, when we dig into it is rarely true. I can’t offhand think of a time where it was true. You know they could do their work. They were just complaining. They just didn’t want to have to do their work.

So, that’s another excuse. I have one client that seems that every employee uses the computers as an excuse for not getting their work done. And it took years to get beyond that. Years to get to the point where hey, listen. There aren’t computer problems here. Get your work done. You know, it’s just crazy here.

Well, baby boomers may be tech adverse. Of course, I’m not. But they’re not the ones who are always being victimized by identity theft. And what that means is the younger they are, the more tech savvy they think they are. The people who, frankly prefer Mac OS to Windows. Android users. Women. Everybody is a victim. But education levels seems to be the number one thing. And by the way, nearly a quarter of those have an associate’s degree, masters or PhD, have already been a victim of identity theft. Now, that should tell you something, right? Millennials are least likely to have their personal data stolen. But the biggest group of victims is Gen-X. And baby boomers sit between millennials and Generation X. Of course now Generation X are the parents typically of millennials. Some baby boomers might have some millennial children as well. But the millennials are kind of surprisingly here, they don’t trust online. They don’t trust having you going online and not having your data stolen.

So who is the most likely? Ok. Here you go. Drumroll please. The most likely person to have their identity stolen is a Gen-X woman with a PhD, who considers herself tech savvy. Owns a MacBook. And uses an android phone. So there you go. You can find a link to the article right here in the show notes. They break down the password habits by the same demographics with the likelihood to get hacked. And it starts with an important question which is how many unique passwords do you use? Now with me, it’s a unique password for every website. A unique password for every email account. A unique password for every machine that I log in to. So, how many do I have? I think last time I checked it was over 800. Well, surprisingly, users with more unique password, are more likely to be hacked. The report found. The tech savvy users use more unique passwords as do android users and women. The only most hacked group that doesn’t practice good password habit are Mac users. And I think a lot of that has to do with people thinking they’re using a Mac so they’re safe. They’re safer maybe than Windows, but they’re not safe. Windows users are more likely to make an extra security effort. In fact, 12 over 12% more of a security effort. Now that’s not surprising either because Windows users think they’re vulnerable. So what this all boils down to is who thinks they’re vulnerable? Who doesn’t think they’re vulnerable? That might be because of their education. It might be because of the operating system they are using. It might even be their age.

So, interesting stats. Look them up. As I said they’re attached right here to our podcast. Just click on the notes. And we’ll talk a little bit more tomorrow about TechSanity, what you can do, and visit us online. Of course, http://CraigPeterson.com. We got some big products coming out for businesses. And we’ll be talking about that over the next few weeks as we them available. Unfortunately there are going to be a little bit of limited time because I’m trying to solve a problem. And the problem is if I teach you, if I give you everything you need and start teaching you, you’re going to forget it. You’re not going to go through the course. So we’re going to be doing some webinars. Some weekly stuff. I’m really going to try and make security an integral part of your life and your business. So we’ll talk about that as we go on. We’re putting a lot of effort into this. Take care. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

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Show Notes:

Do you think you’re safe from ransomware because you’re smart?

Because you know plenty about it. You’ve read the articles. You’ve seen the TV features on it. You’ve listened to my show. So you know, right? Well we’re going to talk today about ransomware and bring a little sanity to this, because people who are going to be affected the most by ransomware aren’t the people you think they are.

For tech and security related questions, send them over to me@craigpeterson.com.

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