50% find security software too difficult

19 October 2007

BRUSSELS – More than fifty percent of Belgians who use a company laptop have little understanding of the security software installed by their employers. This emerged on Thursday from a survey done by SafeBoot, a software company specialising in security programmes.

SafeBoot conducted a survey among 1,300 employees in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Germany. Roughly 52 percent of the Belgians admitted to having difficulty with the security software on their laptop or PDA, or it had never been explained to them by their bosses.

The survey also shows that employees are quite lax in their attitude to company details on their laptops and mobile phones. One in three has no problem with showing the contents of their laptops to strangers. In the case of Belgians this is as many as 36 percent. The Dutch do not score much better with 30 percent. In the Netherlands 38 percent reveal access codes to their families and friends. In Belgium it is only 30 percent and in Great Britain 25 percent.

Sixty-eight percent of the British admitted to having lost a laptop or PDA at some stage. In Germany this only came to 9 percent, in the Netherlands 19 percent and in Belgium 27 percent.