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Study: Millennials Pose Greater Threat to Cyber Security

NEW YORK

November 23, 2008 CS Staff

A recent study completed by Accenture indicates that 60 percent of millennial generation (ages 14 to 27) students and employees are either unaware of their companies’ information technology (IT) policies or are not inclined to follow them.

Key points to the study include:

There is a lack of workplace education on corporate policy. Only 40 percent of all respondents said that their employers have published detailed policies related to posting work or client information on public Web sites. Nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents said they don’t know if their company has such a policy; 17 percent said their employer hasn’t published such a policy, 6 percent said that whatever policy their company has published is too complex to understand, and 6 percent said they will post work or client information on public sites regardless of any policy, at least when communicating with colleagues.
Young people both in the workplace and in school say they expect to use their own technology and mobile devices for work rather than those supplied by their employer. In nearly every category of workplace technology, more than 20 percent of the respondents stated that employer-provided technologies did not meet expectations, while one-third of the mid-Millennials said they expect not only to use the computer of their choice, but also to access the technology applications of their choice once in the workforce (32 percent and 34 percent, respectively).
When asked which technologies they currently use or access for work-related activities that are not supported by their employers, mid-Millennials cited mobile phones (selected by 39 percent), open source technology (19 percent), instant messaging (27 percent), online applications (12 percent) and social networking sites (28 percent). Similarly, they regularly download non-standard technology from free public websites such as open source communities, “mashup” and “widget” providers. For example, three-quarters of the mid-Millenials report that they have accessed online collaborative tools (75 percent) and online applications (71 percent) from free public websites when those technologies were not available at work or not meeting their expectation.
Privacy may be melting away. One out of four (26 percent) working Millennials said that they write openly about themselves and friends online, and one in six (17 percent) share openly details of their life online.

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