security knowledge

Abstract The German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für  Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) offers advice and recommendations for  private users on how to behave securely. Based on these recommendations we  investigate the IT security knowledge and behavior of private users with a rep-resentative study of the German population (N = 1.219). Additionally, we ana-lyze the role of socio-demographic factors (gender, age, education, political ori-entation) for security knowledge and behavior. Results show that German pri-vate users have only moderate IT security knowledge and behavior, with as-pects as gender, age, education and political orientation partly having an influ-ence. Men, higher educated and politically moderately oriented participants  show higher security knowledge, whereas young people and those less knowl-edgeable about security behave less security-conscious. Additionally, security  knowledge and behavior correlate moderately. Therefore, to ...