A recent study, a part of Norton Cybersecurity Insights Report, conducted by IT security giant Symantec Corporation, compares the attitudes of millennials and baby boomers with regard to cyber security. The term ‘baby boomers’ in US refers to the post World War II generation while millennials denotes people born in the last two decades of the previous millennium. The former are people above 55 years of age while the latter are aged between 24 and 54. “Millennials are undoubtedly the front runners in adopting the newest and best forms of technology, be it cloud, social media, or even the new category of Internet enabled devices — wearables. However, our study underlines the fact that while technology adoption is high among millennials in India, security acumen is low. It states the younger generation in India is most likely generation to throw caution to the wind when it comes to online activities,” said Ritesh Chopra, country manager, India, Norton by Symantec.
He noted that this generation often used multiple devices with a constant need to stay connected, hence providing more avenues for cybercriminals to devise and attack. “This makes it all the more important for young people to be more prudent in using the platform and keeping their virtual identities secure,” Chopra added.
Mahendra Limaye, a city-based cyber security expert, said this might be confirmation bias. “The number of young adults using online services is much more. I agree they are a little casual with relation to their online presence. Also, the older users are less likely to use online services for financial transactions,” he said.
His observation is that the younger generation is more likely to fall prey to financial frauds through Internet, specifically through shopping portals. For the older people, it is their ignorance of certain security pointers that made them vulnerable to e-mail frauds, phishing, insurance frauds and credit card frauds, according to Limaye.
His observations seem true with the report revealing that 54% of the millennials had fallen prey to online crime in the last one year as opposed to 28% of the older people. Even when it comes to something as basic as sharing their passwords with others, only half the number of elderly (16%) showed unsafe behaviour as opposed to 31% youngsters.
