No Gender Bias in Identity Fraud

Candy Colp in our sales group sent me an interesting article yesterday regarding a study conducted by antivirus firm AVG into gender bias and online security. The crux of the article, which appeared here was:

"Most men believe that they know more about online security than women, but new research suggests that both sexes are equally vulnerable to malware and other threats."

The study, which involved 1400 presumably equally distributed by gender subjects in the UK, did indeed conclude that men and women and equally likely to fall afoul of malware.

But reading between the lines, the survey also indicated that men were more likely to assume that the security in place on their PC was adequate, versus women, who (more wisely) more often assumed it might not be.

This would possibly explain the tendency of some identity protection firms (see my most recent post below) to target women as customers using television and press.

Two points that I found interesting in the survey was the fact that 1 out of every three people surveyed in the UK had been victimized by identity theft.

AVG's spokeperson was quoted as saying most people felt there was nothing they could do about the situation.