Security awareness in the Netherlands is far above European product
Almost three quarters of all Dutch people are skilled in protecting privacy. A large on the European product of 44 percent.
Statistics Netherlands and Eurostat investigated the digital skills of 16- to 75-year-old Dutch people. By 2021, 80 percent of the population had basic digital skills; the highest percentage of all European.
The lead is impressive, but ‘basic digital skills’ are not much. Statistics Netherlands determines digital skills on the basis of five areas: information and digital literacy, online communication, computers online services, privacy protection and software use. The first area, information and digital literacy, revolves around information seeking and recognizing fake news. If you occasionally come into contact with it, and if you consider one of the other areas once in a while, then you have basic skills.
Googling and emailing now and then is enough to be ‘basic’. The numbers get more impressive when you consider that 20 percent of the population lacks basic digital skills. This group hardly ever comes into contact with the internet. In other words: more than a million Dutch people are digitally literate. Elsewhere in Europe the gap is higher, such as Germany, where about half of the population lacks basic skills. That’s roughly 40 million people.
If you regularly come into contact with the internet, devices and software, then you are ‘more than basic’. 52 percent of the Netherlands belongs to this category, the highest percentage in Europe. The European Commission, Council and Parliament want 80% of the EU population to have basic digital skills by 2030. The Netherlands has achieved the goal. The European product has to increase by almost 30 percent.
Tip: Central government still does not learn from failed ICT projects
phishing
In April, we learned from Zscaler that the number of phishing attacks worldwide has increased by 29 percent to 873.9 million. The Netherlands was an exception to the rule. Here, the number of successful attacks dropped by 38 percent.
More and more cyber criminals are looking for SMS phishing instead of email phishing. The success rate of SMS phishing was higher, as people learn to recognize phishing email over time. We become more aware. Not only in the business world, according to the CBS survey. The Netherlands is particularly good in the field of privacy protection: 72 percent of the Netherlands is highly skilled, the European means is 44 percent.