Men working in large companies are three times more likely to follow risky online behavior than women, according to a SecurityAdvisor study. The research is based on an analysis of more than 500,000 malicious emails and 500,000 visits to dangerous websites sent by corporate employees in 20 different countries.
According to the report, the most common offenses are: forgetting passwords and failing forcing logins, clicking on phishing emails, using adware, using peer-to-peer software and private VPNs, and streaming pirated content.
SecurityAdvisor found that threatening actors target senior management and board members 50 times more often than the average employee.
The report raises questions about possible gender-based behaviors that allow large organizations to be compromised. Data researchers say sophisticated threats can access sensitive corporate data and privileged credentials through social engineering and other techniques.
In SecurityAdvisor’s research, women were linked to about 42 percent of sample data, but 48 percent of secure users. while only 26 percent of risky users. “It was surprising to see a significantly higher proportion of women among safer users and a significantly lower proportion of riskier employees,” said Sai Venkataraman, co-founder and CEO of SecurityAdvisor.
Kellie McElhaney, the director of the Institute for Gender Equality at the University of Berkeley has not studied previous gender data on cybersecurity, but told Cybersecurity Dive that men tend to see negotiations as a game and feel pressured to “win at all costs” and are more likely to resort to unethical behavior, strategies for victory. Problems that include both unethical behavior and harassment are more likely to occur in organizations where there is a male-dominated, hierarchical structure and where past activities have been swept under the rug, McElhaney added.
previous research on corporate online behavior is mixed with respect to gender. A 2020 survey of 1,100 end users by security firm GreatHorn found no statistical difference between men and women in terms of who tended to detect phishing emails. But older workers over the age of 45 were more skeptical about emails, whether they were legitimate or not.
Last month, the insurance provider Chubb however, her report showed that women are taking more steps to protect their personal information. For example, a higher percentage of women regularly changed their passwords, no longer clicked on links from suspicious senders, and did not use the same password in multiple accounts. The same data showed that men are taking more steps to protect financial information, monitoring credit reports and auditing financial statements to a greater extent.
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