The survey found that Internet users often do not recognize a potential threat when they encounter one. The test sees respondents confronted with several potentially dangerous situations that occur regularly on the Internet when surfing the Web, such as, downloading files or viewing social networking sites. Each scenario offers a choice of several answers. Depending on the possible negative consequences, each answer is assigned a score – the safer the user's choice, the higher the score, and vice versa.

Representatives from 16 countries scored an average of 95 points out of a possible 150. This means respondents only chose safe options in half of the hypothetical situations; in the remaining situations, they exposed themselves to the risk of unpleasant consequences.

The test also revealed:

• 24% of respondents were able to identify a genuine web page without also selecting a phishing (i.e. fake) page.
• 58% selected only phishing sites designed to steal people's credentials without choosing the genuine page.
• 10% were prepared to open an attached file without checking it – the equivalent of manually launching a malicious program in many cases.
• 19% would disable a security solution if it tried to prevent the installation of a program.

Andrew Mamonitis, Managing Director of Kaspersky Lab ANZ says, "Self-preservation is an integral part of our existence. In the real world, we know how to reduce the risk of money or property loss: we have learnt about it from an early age. When we are offline, we are always on guard, but when it comes to the Internet, the self-preservation instinct often fails us. Everything has a digital format: our personal life, intellectual property and money. All this requires that we adopt the same kind of responsibility as in real life, as the cost of making a mistake online can be just as high. That’s why we encourage everyone to evolve with technology and improve their cyber savviness”.

Kaspersky has the online test here to tell you how cyber savvy you really are. I got 120 out of 150 possible points – only 11% of test participants demonstrated that level of cyber savviness but the answers are provided and I will improve.