Page 51 - Cyber Defense eMagazine for September 2020

P. 51

New cyber literacy

From the technical standpoint, the main enemy of any state and company is not a brilliant hacker-pro,
but an illiterate employee/citizen who goes to all the links that come to the email, mindlessly clicks on
advertising banners, rummages through dubious sites during working hours. As a result, it could steal
information about customers, transactions, monitor conversations, and clutter the browser with ads. It
has become much easier now because people are always in cyberspace.

I conducted a survey to see whether people are aware of cyber threats (account hacking, identity theft,
bullying) through mobile apps (one of the key element of post-digital age). Respondents were people at
the age of 18-64, working not in IT-sphere. Among 386 surveyed 41% are aware of it, 13% have never
thought about it, and 46% unaware of the risk of cyberthreat, while 92% of the surveyed aware of cyber
threat via computers.

Table 1. Awareness of cyber threats via mobile apps and computers

Mobile apps Computers

Aware 41% 13%

Unaware 46% 3%

I do not know 13% 5%

Furthermore, the more information we have, the more we rely on so-called reputational methods of
evaluation. The paradox is that the incredibly increased access to information and knowledge that we
have today does not give us new opportunities and does not make us cognitively autonomous. It only
forces us to rely even more on other people's judgments and assessments about the information that has
fallen on us. Information is only valuable if it has already been filtered, evaluated, and commented on by
others. In this sense, reputation today becomes the central pillar of the post-digital age. The way the
authority of knowledge is built today makes us depend on the inevitably distorted judgments of other
people, most of whom we don't even know.

GlobalWebIndex reports that 90% of Internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 now watch online
videos every month, which, if applied to the total number of Internet users in the world, would amount to
more than half of the world's population. Moreover, 42% of users faced online insults, 32% - with the
spread of rumors, 16% - with threats of physical violence (GlobalWebIndex, 2019). Carriers of extremist
ideas are radicalized on YouTube, and social networks encourage the polarization of political views.
Recommendation algorithms (they show what you will be interested in based on information about you
and your browsing history), which work on all popular resources, contribute to the spread of such content.

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