Millennials really do care about cybersecurity

Half of young voters believe there hasn't been enough discussion of cybersecurity in the current election campaign and a small majority say a candidate's stance on the issue would influence their decision whether to support them, according to a new poll.

Half of young voters believe there hasn’t been enough discussion of cybersecurity in the current election campaign and a small majority say a candidate’s stance on the issue would influence their decision whether to support them.

The data comes from a Zogby poll released by Raytheon and the U.S. government’s “Stop. Think. Connect.” campaign as part of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

For the survey as a whole, Zogby surveyed 3,779 adults ages 18–26 in Australia, Germany, Japan, Jordan, Poland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States. For the U.S. data reported here, there was 1,007 respondents.

This increasing awareness appears to correlate with a growing number of young people (nearly half of all respondents) who have heard news about cyberattacks in the past year; and with larger numbers saying they had access to cybersecurity activities like training.

The number of young adults who said they had read, heard or seen news about a cyberattack in the past year rose by 15 percentage points from 2015 to 2016 — from 33 percent to 48 percent. In the U.S., the figure nearly doubled from 36 percent in 2015 to 64 percent this year.

Globally, the survey found significant increases in the numbers of young people who said they had access to cybersecurity activities like training or competitions. The proportion of respondents saying such cyber programs were available to them increased by 26 percent to 68 percent, compared with 54 percent last year. The jump was largely driven by respondents in the U.S. and Europe, with much smaller increases in Asia and the Middle East.

There is a significant gender gap here: nearly twice as many men as women say they know about such activities.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure