It found 83% of 1,000 people questioned were not doing enough to protect themselves online, with 53% saying they did not know how to improve security.

Some 42% relied on family and friends for advice, the survey revealed.

It was released to mark a Get Safe Online campaign backed by the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the government.

Net losses

It found 83% of 1,000 people questioned were not doing enough to protect themselves online, with 53% saying they did not know how to improve security.

Some 42% relied on family and friends for advice, the survey revealed.

It was released to mark a Get Safe Online campaign backed by the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the government.

Net losses

\"Increasingly we are seeing organised criminals turning to the internet as a vehicle for their criminality,\" said Sharon Lemon, head of the crime unit.

\"And as more of us are connecting to the internet to shop, bank and communicate, we need to make sure that we do so as safely as possible.\"

The Get Safe Online campaign is a national initiative aimed at the general public that will try to combat ignorance about basic computer security.

Headed by the government and the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, the campaign is also backed by companies such as eBay, Microsoft, BT and Yell.

The education campaign will use a website and a national tour aimed at getting people thinking about staying safe when they use the web.

The survey, conducted to support the campaign launch, found that 17% said net crime was the everyday threat they worried about most.

By comparison, 18% considered burglary of their home as their biggest worry.

What most people (40%) feared was that a criminal would get hold of their credit or debit card details and raid their bank account.

Despite these fears many of those questioned, 85%, did not think that doing something about cyber crime was their problem.

Almost half, 49%, said businesses should tackle it and 11% think the government should take it on.

The report found that although people were worried by the threat of net crime, more than half, 52%, said they knew little about the best way to protect themselves.

The survey found that those who were doing something to protect themselves often did not do enough.

A quarter of those questioned said they had no firewall sitting between their computer and the web and 20% had no anti-virus software to stop malicious programs finding and compromising their PC.

Of those that did use security products, only 14% updated monthly, 32% did so every three months and 6% never updated programs designed to protect them.

By comparison, many anti-virus firms now update their scanning systems every hour to cope with the deluge of viruses and malicious programs being pumped out by criminals.

Some bad user habits were revealed by the survey too. It found that 22% of people opened attachments on e-mails from people they did not know - one of the many routes malicious hackers use to get viruses, worms and spyware onto PCs.

A further 9% happily forwarded these potentially infected attachments to friends and family.

ICM interviewed 1,000 people across the UK in August for the survey.

[Edited on 10/28/2005 by Mega X.exe]

My computer is sitting behind two firewalls and has anti-spyware and any-virus. I update all of it whenever an update comes along and use Firefox over IE. Looks like I\'m a minority.

I think that we need some kind of education, here. Of those 1000 people, who had atually had been well informed beforehand? Not many, by the looks of it. Maybe it should be part of IT lessons in schools, or something.

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Or ill-informed.

It isn\'t stupidity, it\'s poor education!

I\'d say it\'s a little of both.

I think that if people were told about the whole internet security thing, people would go with it. Unfortunately, in ICT lessons, we spend most of our time designing advertisements for imaginary companies.

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When people first get the internet, they treat it as a phone. They think it is a novel way of looking at documents held on computers far away. They don\'t realise that it is effectively also a gateway to their computer from anywhere in the world. If they were told more, if they were educated, if they actually had Information and Communication Technology lessons, instead of how-to-make-publications lessons, we would be a little better off.

Ironically, many Firewalls, etc. are downloadable from the net, so you have to risk your computer in order to protect it... (you can buy them in PC World type shops)

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Protecting something pysically is very different from protecting something from criminals. People look after computer physically, even though they are leaving it ver vulnerable to attack, and that comes from a lack of education.

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I doubt we are ever going to agree on this. You call it idiocy, I call it ignorance.

Let\'s just say it\'s a bit of both: but people should just learn from their mistakes. That\'s one of the reasons why you make them.

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I think God left a quote box open... if you look, her quote transitions into her Sig.

I\'ll throw her a PM.