By Joe Garofoli
It seems like every day there’s another security breach and more phishing schemes clogging our e-mail boxes. Americans should be terrified and outraged, fearful to tread online due to the risk of a digital attack, right?
Nope. The nation’s response is a resounding: “Meh.”
At least that’s according to the latest survey from Unisys Security Index, which regularly takes the temperature of the 10,000 U.S. consumers. It found that 37 percent of Americans said they were not concerned at all about computer viruses and spam, the largest proportion of the survey. Only 27 percent were “somewhat concerned.”
Respondents were similarly unconcerned about the safety of online banking and transactions. The largest chunk of participants — 34 percent — were not concerned and 28 percent were only somewhat concerned.
Unisys attributes the ho-hum attitude to a common principle: no harm, no foul.
“It’s possible that since the majority of people have not been personally harmed by these cybercrimes, they perceive there is nothing to worry about. Even a data breach involving the theft of credit card numbers belonging to millions of individuals results in little financial pain to consumers because the losses are absorbed by businesses and financial institutions (banks, credit card companies).”
