Mobile security attitudes in the UK remain weak

British consumers carrying smartphones and tablets still do not take adequate precautions to protect themselves.

According to a recent mobile security study that was conducted by Trend Micro, a security firm, many consumers in the United Kingdom who have smartphones and tablets have yet to adopt appropriate precautions in order to guard themselves against the theft of their data.

The survey involved the participation of 2,500 device users throughout the United Kingdom.

The results of this study indicated that 27 percent of the research participants have lost up to three company devices. Another 52 percent regularly carry a device on their person that contains sensitive data from work, which increases the risk that their employers and customers could experience fraud from a mobile security data breach.

This mobile security finding should be taken seriously by businesses in the country.

The survey showed that 61 percent of the participants who use their smartphones and tablets for work purposes have not even protected those devices with a password. Among all of the participants 20 percent were using their personal smartphones for business reasons, which means that this number of unprotected device users is a considerable one. Among those who have gone to the effort of protecting their devices with a password, 63 percent have used the same one or a similar one across all of their various digital accounts.

Almost one in every three participants said that they use Wi-Fi hotspots on a regular basis. However 56 percent of hotspot users do not check the security of those spaces before they connect. Twenty two percent access their work emails from those locations, while 10 percent access confidential documents in those public connection environments.

This survey indicates that in the United Kingdom, there is a standard of relative carelessness when it comes to their attitude toward mobile security and the link between their behaviors and the safety of corporate data when using their smartphones and tablets for work purposes, said the report. In fact, among the respondents, 44 percent had a greater concern regarding the loss of their own personal content than they had about giving access to sensitive business data to cyber criminals.