Home PCs are Safer Than Small Business Sites

UK-based Web hosting and domain name provider Heart Internet recently released a handy infographic that compares the state of website security to that of personal computer security, and found that site security "simply isn't taken as seriously as the measures we take for our home computers."

The Website Invaders infographic (see below), which playfully adapts its theme from the once-popular arcade game Space Invaders, begins by comparing the percentage of home computers that have an anti-virus software installed (96 percent) with the number of small business websites that use an anti-virus software, which is just 65 percent, despite the fact that 6000 websites are blacklisted by search engines everyday for carrying viruses.

In addition, the infographic also provides helpful tips for both PC and site owners. It warns them both not to simply ignore updates to their anti-virus software (and we're all guilty of that sometimes, aren't we?), and to downloaded them whenever they're prompted to do so.

And when it comes to password protection, easily one of the most common security measures in the tech world, 75 percent of PC users use passwords to protect their data, but only 50 percent of small business sites do, despite the fact that they house a lot of employee and consumer information. The infographic says that passwords that are nine characters long and use a mixture of numbers, symbols and upper and lowercase letters will take over 40,000 years to crack, and that regularly changing passwords helps site owners stay ahead of password hacking techniques.

Heart Internet also discovered that only 45 percent of home PCs and 35 percent of small business websites are protected from phishing, although around 156 million phishing emails are sent every day, and the number of phishing attacks around the world reached 445,004 in 2012, a 58 percent increase from the year before.

And finally, the company found that while 40 percent of small business's backup their website data online, only 23 percent of home users have secure data backups. The infographic advises PC owners to backup sensitive data on a hard drive with a secure password, and informs small business sites to take regular backups so that they can easily restore their sites to their most recent clean states.