[INFOGRAPHIC] Are You Safe Online?

The vast number of users on the Internet definitely makes for a lucrative market for businesses. We see more companies offering social media, gaming, e-Commerce, banking, and other services online. At 2.6 billion, the world’s web surfers exceed the population of China and India combined! That’s a big potential market!

With more services available, online activity every 24 hours has risen by the millions, even billions. Here are some examples:

The number of email messages sent every day almost quadrupled from 97 billion in 2007 to 419 billion today.
There are almost thrice as many active Starcraft players today (500,000) as there were active Battle.net users (200,000) in 2004.
Since its release in 2004, the often phished online role-playing game, World of Warcraft now has 9.1 million subscribers.

Apart from entrepreneurs, cybercriminals have also taken advantage of the dramatic increase in online engagement. The 150,000 average unique daily threats we see today dwarfs the mere 57 count we saw back in 2006. As a result, more spam, malware, and bad URLs now exist in cyberspace.

The threats nowadays are not only increasing in quantity, but in sophistication as well. The basic protection we used to rely on is not enough against new generation threats. Along with virus protection and rootkit detection, social networking security is a must in this age of digital interaction. Users need to have a good web reputation service to block access to malicious URLs and configure privacy settings in their social networking accounts so as to keep critical information safe.

Also, old spam filters may not work as well as combined anti-spam and optimized firewall can against threats like the Blackhole Exploit Kit that target users through spam messages bearing links to exploits, among others. Specialized platform security is also relevant, especially as more threats will likely aim at the upcoming Windows 8 Metro and the growing Mac OS market.

Find out more on how you can revive security through redefined basic protection through our new infographic, “Are You Safe Online?”