Thanks to the Safeonweb campaign 'Passwords are a thing of the past', internet users are now better equipped to enjoy the internet safely.
Every year in October, the Centre for Cyber Security Belgium (CCB) and the Cyber Security Coalition launch a cyber security awareness campaign. This year, we encouraged internet users to apply stronger secure measures for their accounts using two-step verification. This was no easy task, but fortunately, the message did not fall on deaf ears.
The survey conducted 2 weeks after the end of the campaign among a sample of 400 Belgians aged 16 and older showed that no less than 58% of respondents had noticed the campaign and 54% of those who had noticed the campaign had taken one or more actions. Our intention was to capture the attention of internet users and we clearly succeeded in doing so.
Many people look up information after they noticed the campaign, and talked about it with others. 14% of respondents said: 'I visited safeonweb.be'; 8% replied 'I looked up information about two-step verification'; 8% said 'I talked about it with friends, colleagues, family'; 8% responded 'I recommended two-step verification to friends, colleagues, family' and 7% said 'I looked up information about password managers'.
However, a lot of internet users took things a step further. 4% said "I enabled two-step authentication to log into at least 1 of my accounts", 4% replied "I helped someone set up two-step verification" and 10% said "I changed my passwords".
At least 200,000 new users for two-step verification
If we apply these figures to the entire population, at least 200,000 people have started using two-step verification. We owe these great results the many partners who campaigned together with us, such as Smartschool, the Belgian Federal Police and many cities and towns that shared the campaign through all their channels. Thanks to the Cyber Security Coalition, the campaign was picked up by numerous private, public and academic organizations, which is extremely important for its success.
Together, we can make the internet a safe place!
