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Brilliant. Measuring how well typical users understand/implement security measures has long been overdue.

Personally, I find Figure 2 (on Page 5) of the paper most interesting: it shows the difference between expert and non-expert mentioning certain practices -- which to me seems roughly equal to how under-/overappreciated that practice is.

The top contenders for underrated (i.e. used more frequently by experts compared to non-experts) are: System updates, 2-factor-auth, password managers, unique passwords and checking for https. Most overrated: antivirus, password changes, only visiting known sites and using strong passwords.

As a security community, we appear to have gotten the point across when it comes to antivirus and strong passwords. Anyone giving general advice should consider this and emphasize the "underrated" measures.




> Anyone giving general advice should consider this and emphasize the "underrated" measures.

Funny enough, we did exactly that last month!

https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/06/guide-securing-your-busin...

Unfortunately, Archive.org did not crawl us before this Google blog post came out, so I can't prove that I did not ninja edit the post. Google has a cache from July 8, though: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-ovweQ...




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