®
NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release Contact: M. Glenn Newkirk
14 January 2008 Phone: 919.838.8570
glenn_newkirk@infosentry.com www.infosentry.com
Public Confidence in
A recent
national opinion trend survey of adults in the
M. Glenn Newkirk, President of InfoSENTRY Services, Inc., and research director for this national opinion survey, said, “Following a precipitous fall in confidence in the Federal government’s ability to secure the information in its networks between our 2006 and 2007 surveys, public confidence levels in Federal, state, and local government information security capabilities remained very low and even declined in our 2008 survey. Americans’ confidence in information security and accuracy at banks-financial institutions and hospitals-medical clinics was almost twice as high as for government institutions’ information security and accuracy.”
InfoSENTRY Services, Inc. contracted Opinion Research Corporation, a leading national opinion research company, to ask a random sample of US respondents who are 18 years old and over the following question in January CARAVAN® surveys in 2006, 2007, and 2008:
“Now I am going to read you some types of
organizations and governments. As I read each one, using a scale of 1 to
5, where 1 means very low confidence and 5 means very high confidence, please
tell me how confident you are that the information in these organizations’
computer systems is accurate and secure.”
Table 1 contains summary trend results of the telephone survey over three years. Figure 1 graphically presents those summary results.
“By aggregating the positive confidence scores (4 and 5) and subtracting from them the negative confidence scores (1 and 2) on the 1 – 5 scale to derive a ‘Net Information Security Confidence Score,’ the tracking surveys reveal that hospitals and medical clinics’ Net Information Security Confidence Scores remained stable at 41%, 40%, or 41% over the three years’ surveys,” Newkirk said. “We added a new category of banks and financial institutions in 2007 and found even higher Net Information Security Confidence Scores for those institutions.”
Newkirk continued, “It is probably not a coincidence that financial institutions and medical institutions, both of which are in regulated environments with increasingly sophisticated information security standards, have had fewer highly publicized security breaches in recent years. The best net Score on the table was 48% in 2008 for banks and financial institutions, statistically unchanged from the Score of 47% in 2007.”
Educational institutions, identified in InfoSENTRY’s surveys as “your area's schools and universities,” were in the middle of the pack with Scores of 32% in 2006, 30% in 2007, and 31% in 2008. The reportedly widespread failures of information security to protect student, faculty, employee, and alumni and alumnae personal data at numerous universities and colleges in 2006 and 2007 appear to have remained under the public radar sufficiently to prevent a decline in educational institutions’ information security confidence Scores.
Table 1
Net Information Security
Confidence Scores for Key
*The
2006 survey did not include banks/financial institutions as a response
category.
Figure 1
Trends in Public Confidence of
*The
2006 survey did not include banks/financial institutions as a response
category.
Newkirk
commented, “The Net Information Security Confidence Score for large
corporations rebounded to 27% in 2008 from the drop to 17% in 2007. The Score’s
fall by 10% from 2006 to 2007 was offset by the 10% jump from 2007 to 2008. The
primary sources for the up-and-down swings were among women and
African-Americans, whose Scores for large corporations dropped significantly in
2007—and then rebounded slightly in 2008. The Score’s fluctuations for large
corporations over the three annual surveys reflect the largest swings for any
of the survey’s institutions. Public confidence in large corporations’
information security and accuracy has improved from dismal (17%) in 2007 to very
bad (27%) in 2008. This ‘improvement’ came in a year in which there were
reports of the largest corporate data loss in
InfoSENTRY’s surveys over the past three years have shown a downward trend in confidence in the Federal government’s information security and accuracy. Newkirk stated, “Part of this trend of a low 28% Net Information Security Confidence Score in 2006 to a lower 24% in 2007 to a very low 22% in 2008 might simply reflect the overall declining public approval of the Federal government. Nonetheless, it is a statistically significant drop. It is likely that the widely noted losses of personal health records of 900,000 military personnel and dependents, reported hacks at the Department of Commerce, reported data exposure at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, highly publicized email losses at the White House, and highlighted data losses at the Veterans Administration took their toll on the Federal government’s Scores in recent years.”
Figure 1 graphically demonstrates that the civic institutions of Federal, state, and local governments consistently received the lowest confidence ratings of all the institutions in InfoSENTRY’s survey. Newkirk commented, “There are very few good explanations for these numbers. The first explanation might be that the American public is wrong and government information is more secure than they believe it is. If that is the case, then government organizations have not done adequate jobs instilling confidence in the American public about their good information security practices. The second explanation might be that American public is right not to have confidence in the security and accuracy of the information in government networks—because the information is not sufficiently secure and accurate. Either way, it is an uncomfortable situation for government information technology managers. Public confidence in government information security and accuracy is broadly very low and getting even lower in the case of the Federal government.”
This report presents the findings of
telephone surveys conducted among national probability samples of 1004 adults
in January 2006, 1017 adults in January 2007, and 1018 adults in January 2008.
All respondents were 18 years of age and older, living in private households in
the continental
Interviewing for this Opinion Research
Center CARAVAN® Survey was completed during the period January 12 – 15, 2006,
January 4 – 7, 2007, and January 3 – 6, 2008.
InfoSENTRY Services, Inc. is an
independent information technology services firm based in
The survey questions and survey
response set of the survey are Copyright 2008, by InfoSENTRY Services, Inc. All
rights reserved. The InfoSENTRY logo and InfoSENTRY® are registered trademarks
of InfoSENTRY Services, Inc. CARAVAN® is a registered trademark of Opinion
Research Corporation.
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