ESET, the pioneers of proactive cyber-protection, has conducted a survey on social media of smartphone usage ahead of the Mobile World Congress with interesting conclusions: almost ten percent of surveyed users had their phone lost or stolen in the last 12 months, 29 percent do not lock their smartphone, and almost 20 percent do not backup content on their smartphone at all.

The aim of the survey of around five hundred smartphone users on social media was to gather data on mobile security.

According to Castro, another must to protect against any damage is to regularly back up the data stored on a smartphone. Based on ESET’s survey,  19.7 percent of users do not actually back up data at all and 35.7 percent only do sometimes (14.7% do so daily, 19.9% weekly and 10% monthly).

One of the best protection tools against physical breaches of phones is locking the device. However, 29.3 percent do not lock their phone or screen against unwanted access at all with the vast majority – 55.3 percent – doing so with a PIN number (12.5 percent use fingerprint and 3% face detector).

“One of the best ways to protect access to business networks, as well as personal emails is to use 2-factor authentication, “ says Carey van Vlaanderen, CEO of ESET Southern Africa. 

Here we can support a welcome trend, 64.9 percent of those surveyed already used some form of second authentication for online services (e.g. via text messages).

This can be especially important for services like online banking which is accessed by 53 percent of surveyed users.

In addition, the survey highlighted the importance of protecting the “cloud” of smartphone users, with 26.9 percent already using solely these cloud services and 23.1 percent saving the data both locally and in the cloud.

Note: this survey has been conducted via ESET social media pages among around five hundred social media users using smartphones, surveyed during January 29 – February 17, 2015.