Nearly half of Americans have experienced cyberattacks or digital scams, according to a recent report by Consumer Reports, Aspen Digital, and GCA.
This year, cyberattacks and digital scams continue to pose a serious threat, affecting many people. According to the 2024 Consumer Cyber Readiness Report, the third annual effort by Consumer Reports, Aspen Digital, and the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), although consumers are taking steps to improve their cybersecurity online, the adoption of practices and tools has remained flat between 2023 and 2024. Strikingly, 35 percent of people in the U.S. had one of their online accounts hacked or taken over by a scammer, the report found, and nearly 1 in 10 lost money to a digital scam or cyber attack. The findings in this report beg the question: are consumers (still) not prepared to face the barrage of online scams?
The majority of attempts began on email (30%), followed by social media, text messages, or messaging apps. The most common type of scam or attack experienced was phishingattempts (38%), where scammers deceive consumers into handing over personal information such as passwords or credit card numbers.
Other Cyber Readiness Report highlights include:
- 46% of Americans have encountered a digital scam and 19% of them have lost money, meaning that 9% of Americans have lost money in a digital scam.
- There are racial disparities: among Americans who have personally encountered a cyberattack or digital scam attempt, Black and Hispanic Americans are twice as likely to have lost money to a digital attack or scam as white Americans.
Findings show that the adoption of practices and tools by consumers to improve their security online has not changed from 2023 to 2024. According to the report, consumers did not significantly increase:
- The use of strong passwords for home Wi-Fi network and smartphone access.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Unique passwords across different accounts, or password managers.
Staying Safe From Online Scams
The report also offers useful recommendations to help consumers and small businesses guard against online scams and cyber attacks:
- Use multifactor authentication, moving to more reliable and safer security key or app-based versions.
- Be aware that group chats are often not encrypted.
- Turn off location services for any apps that do not need it to prevent them from tracking your activity online. Here’s a quick guide showing how to turn off location services on the iphone and android.
Consumer Reports offers a free Security Planner tool, which makes customized recommendations to cut down on data collection and protect sensitive personal information after you answer a handful of simple questions.
GCA creates free, useful Cybersecurity Toolkits that make a real impact on improving security for organizations, individuals and mission-based organizations.
The Takeaway
Implementing basic cyber hygiene leads to a significant improvement in the ability to fend off cyber attacks and especially ransomware.
“While we work to ensure Internet technology is secure by design, there are simple steps consumers can take to be safer. It’s great to see some of those steps becoming more popular, even if slowly,“ said Philip Reitinger, GCA’s President and CEO.
Learn more by reading the related press release.
