Survey shows millennials are less cybersecure than parents

Millenials often like to pretend that they're the most tech-savvy generation out there, dismissing their parents as old relics who don't know the first thing about life online.

However, new research has shown that older generations are actually more likely to be secure online than younger digital natives.

The 2016 Norton Cybersecurity Insights Report has revealed that despite living virtually their entire lives online, millennials are more likely to use insecure online behaviour than baby boomers.

32 per cent of millennials in the UK share their passwords for online services while only 13 per cent of baby boomers do.

In addition, just 33 per cent of millennials said they always use a secure password - one consisting of at least eight letters, numbers and symbols. By contrast, the ratio of secure password use among baby boomers was 49 per cent.

Many millennials feel that security is simply not worth bothering over. One in three reportedly felt that security breaches no longer have any real consequences, due to their increasing frequency, while one in five felt like their chances of being compromised by cybercrime is negligible.

This has contributed to a much higher online crime rate among millennials, with 31 per cent reporting to have been victims of cybercrime.

The cautious attitude of baby boomers, however, has led to just 13 per cent of respondents in that age range experiencing online crime.

According to security expert Graham Cluley, "it's depressing to hear that teenagers are using the internet in an unsafe way, and aren't learning the lessons on how to stay secure online."

"It would be nice to think that having never known a time when companies weren't getting hacked, social media accounts weren't being broken into, and data wasn't been stolen, that more of them would take some of the steps necessary to reduce the risks of themselves becoming victims."

Adam Shepherd

Adam Shepherd has been a technology journalist since 2015, covering everything from cloud storage and security, to smartphones and servers. Over the course of his career, he’s seen the spread of 5G, the growing ubiquity of wireless devices, and the start of the connected revolution. He’s also been to more trade shows and technology conferences than he cares to count.

Adam is an avid follower of the latest hardware innovations, and he is never happier than when tinkering with complex network configurations, or exploring a new Linux distro. He was also previously a co-host on the ITPro Podcast, where he was often found ranting about his love of strange gadgets, his disdain for Windows Mobile, and everything in between.

You can find Adam tweeting about enterprise technology (or more often bad jokes) @AdamShepherUK.