Mobile Phone Security Awareness and Practices of Students in Budapest

Abstract

The present paper presents the results of a survey about users’ security practices regarding mobile phone usage that took place in 4 Universities of Budapest in February 2010. We targeted an extended pool of respondents reaching 959 answers. The general users' feeling is that mobile phone communication is secure and this possibly leads to a relaxation. As results indeed further showed, students are unaware of the necessary measures to avoid a possible unauthorized access and/or sensitive data retrieval from their phones and that they lack proper security education. There was also a statistically important difference in the answers, depending on the type of operating system (modern or not). Since users fail to secure their phones they should either be educated or preferably presented with transparent security features, built in their phones, in order to mitigate the dangers. Keywords-mobile phone security; security practices; user interface security; questionnaire survey; mobile phone usage