Publication details

This Research paper describes various threats and vulnerabilities the home users face whilst using the services offered by the World Wide Web. It describes the common threats and the way the home users perceive them. Several aspects on online security are discussed that helps home users learn and understand the threats they are posed to. Reports from previous surveys are presented that gives a clear understanding on how the users perceive online security. More the online security perception, the better is the level of security achieved by the home internet users. The main outcome of this research is that the Security guidelines for home users are vast over the internet. Many websites offer simple and very easy to understand guidelines and yet the users are not able to reach those websites. Publishing security information on certain websites is not going to help users and previous survey results shows that the existing media awareness techniques are not succeeded in promoting awareness among home users so it is very important how the cybercrime and online security is presented to the open world. This paper makes a sincere attempt to recommend some new set of online security techniques that could be used to increase the user perceptions and also a solution to improve the existing media awareness techniques so that the governing bodies and software application vendors could reach more users educating them on online safety aspects.

Vikharuddin M, Furnell SM