Identity Theft Concerns in Germany

The newest wave of our Security Index is the latest evidence of a big gap:  On the one hand, the constant high fear of German consumers that  personal data is stolen and misused, and on the other hand what they are willing to contribute to make their own data save.
Almost three quarters of the German survey participants are currently seriously concerned about identity theft.

• 65 per cent said to be seriously concerned about other people obtaining their credit or debit card details and
• 55 per cent have big fears about computer security in relation to viruses and spam.
• On the contrary, only 37 per cent use and/or update hard to guess passwords regularly and
• only 41 per cent read privacy statements and comply with policies on a regular basis.

The picture in medium businesses and enterprises isn’t much better. While these companies have established security policies, employees often don’t comply with them. Their personal security related actions only consider the obvious things, which is not always the best solution. But what is the reason for such behaviour?

Often security policies have very little or no relation to reality and business processes. Security Policies are mostly written in a specific technical language which is barely understandable for employees who are not security experts. As an industry, we are keen to understand and drive significant change to legacy IT policies to address and align user productivity, business processes and enterprise security properly. I see the latest Security Index results also as proof, that we are on the right track by providing our customers with user oriented, dedicated security concepts. Only if we can keep security simple, precise and easy to use, employees will accept and implement these policies. Besides all the threats and attacks out there, we should always bear in mind that the weakest link in the chain is still the unaware user.

Tags-   Credit card information CyberSecurity Identity theft IT security Security Security concepts Security policy Security threats Unisys Security Index

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