(Source: http://www.sabc.co.za)

64 percent of Russian Internet users became victims of cyber fraud at least once.

This was stated in a joint study by the Nielsen Research Company and Mail.ru Group received by Lenta.ru. As the researchers note, Russians still do not pay enough attention to their online security. So, one of the most important rules of Internet safety is frequent change of password.

However, according to the research, only 20 percent of respondents observe this rule. Every fifth respondent, on the contrary, never changed the password of his or her main mailbox, and every third – the password of an additional one. Users change the passwords in social networks even more rarely: 38 percent change it not more frequently than once a year, and 18 percent of respondents have never done this before.

Moreover, almost a quarter of e-mail owners use the password of the main mailbox on other websites as well, 62 percent of them repeat the same pincode in social networks, 27 percent - in online stores and 5 per cent – in additional mailboxes. Almost a half of the respondents do not check secure connection to the websites (HTTPS protocol employed by the most part of large resources in Russia and around the world, protecting you against eavesdropping by hackers), when entering their personal information.

Besides, the respondents named such reasons why they became the victims of hackers as a simple password, a virus, or a link to a fraudulent website. Other options mentioned by respondents include answers to fraudulent messages and use of the same password for several websites, and these were named two times less often.

“More than 99 percent of cyber attacks on users are not targeted, but massive. In other words, in most cases the attacker hacks not a specific account, but as many accounts as possible” - the vice-president of Mail.ru Group Anna Artamonova explains. Experts recommend inventing unique identification codes for the most important resources, such as email and social networks, while you can set the same password for the rest of websites. The study involved 1,783 respondents aged 15 to 64 years.