Safe Surfing is currently not being practiced by broadband customers

Following a recent report by the Get Safe Online campaign in which many UK customers showed poor or sloppy behaviour online many internet users are being urged to improve their safety practices when going online.

It was found in the report know as the ‘2008 UK Internet Security’ that 17 percent of internet users had not checked who an email was from before opening an email attachment, 23 percent said that they had posted either personal or confidential information online, and 66 percent of broadband users said that they logged into more than one website requiring a log-in with the same password.

There are, however consequences for this cavalier approach to internet security. It was also found from the 2008 UK Internet Security report that 6 percent of users had either been bullied or harassed online, 10 percent had been a victim of a computer hacker, 15 percent had been subject to identity theft, 16 percent had visited scam websites or replied to scam emails, 23 percent had fallen for a phishing scam, and 23 percent of users had been hit by a virus attack.
Of those that were questioned in the report, however, online virus protection was an area that was quite popular and, despite contrary trend being shown, 85 percent of those question said that their systems had some form of virus protection software. It was also found that within the last month over 50 percent of users had updated their antivirus software.

Many broadband internet users in the UK did say that they were confident about accessing the internet even in the light of these statistics showing the internet as a dangerous place. The report also found that 33 percent of users are online for about one to two hours per day and 15 percent stay online for about three to four hours a day.