Survey confirms what you already knew

A recent survey published at Dark Reading confirms what customers have been telling us for over a year. According to the survey, “70 percent of shoppers don’t understand the significance of the green browser bar, and 20 percent of those questioned do not understand what the golden security padlock represents.”

This follows on the heels of a Harvard study from 2007 which found 53 percent of the participants logging on to a faux banking site despite strongly worded pop-ups, broken SSL certs and missing site authentication cues. It seems to be human nature to ignore security warnings, perhaps because we are confronted with them on a regular basis.

The challenge for IT managers isn’t very different to the behavior exhibited by consumers in these surveys. In most cases, companies have already purchased security technologies to help keep their networks healthy and their systems secure. Despite the efforts of the IT department, end users love to disable desktop firewalls, let their anti virus subscriptions expire and keep hitting ‘Cancel’ on urgent Windows Updates. Much of the challenge to keeping a healthy network isn’t necessarily about deploying new technology to do this things, but simply enforcing that solutions already deployed are actually in use!