On the User Awareness of Mobile Security Recommendations

Modern mobile devices face a number of security threats that put users and their data at risk. Although many different security options exist to protect against these threats, the selection of such options is often up to the user. In this paper, we review the current literature on mobile security and provide a comprehensive list of recommendations for user safety. We also conduct a user study to ascertain awareness concerning these recommendations. Our results show that users, especially those without strong information technology familiarity, tend to ignore or be unaware of many critical security options. Further work must develop methods to improve awareness and adoption of mobile security. The list of recommendations provided in this paper and the knowledge gained from the user study could be helpful in this regard. We suggest building educational tools to improve user awareness of security vulnerabilities and increase their protection against known mobile threats.