New campaign to highlight need for internet security

Dublin- Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan has today launched the makeITsecure campaign. The campaign aims to raise awareness of IT security amongst Irish internet users. The campaign, which is being run on an all Ireland basis for the first time, is led by a public/private consortium and will run for two weeks.

The Minister also launched very research into usage patterns amongst Irish home internet users, which was carried out as part of the campaign. The aim of this year’s campaign is to specifically address and educate people about issues that they face online on a day to day basis such as phishing, spyware, identity theft and security issues when social networking. Research shows that less than half of all internet users understand the term “phishing”. According to the iReach 2008 IT Security Report, phishing attacks will increase to an unprecedented level for this year.

Phishing involves attempts to fraudulently extract sensitive information from computer users by pretnending to be communicating from a supposedly trustworthy organisation, such as a bank, for example.Other iReach findings indicate that almost every third internet user has experienced some form of online threat in the past.Research carried out by Espion demonstrated that an average computer connected to the internet is subject to an average of 298 attempted attacks each day.