Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a study in which students at a four-year university were surveyed in an effort to analyze and verify the differences in perceived security awareness, security-related activities, and security damage experiences when using smartphones, based on demographic variables such as gender, academic year, and college major. Moreover, the perceived security awareness items and security-related activities were tested to verify whether they affect the students’ security damage experience. Based on survey data obtained from 592 participants, the findings indicate that demographic differences exist for some of the survey question items. The majority of the male students replied “affirmative” to some of the questions related to perceived security awareness and “enthusiastic” to questions about security-related activities. Some academic year differences exist in the responses to perceived security awareness and security-related activities. On the whole, freshmen had the lowest level of security awareness. Security alert seems to be very high in sophomores, but it decreases as the students become older. While the difference in perceived security awareness based on college major was not significant, the difference in some security-related activities based on that variable was significant. No significant difference was found in some items such as storing private information in smartphones and frequency of implementation of security applications based on the college major variable. However, differences among the college majors were verified in clicking hyperlinks in unknown SMS messages and in the number of security applications in smartphones. No differences were found in security damage experiences based on gender, academic year, and college major. Security awareness items had no impact on the experience of security damage in smartphones. However, some security activities, such as storing resident registration numbers in a smartphone, clicking hyperlinks in unknown SMS messages, the number of security apps in a smartphone, and the frequency of implementation of security apps did have an impact on security damage.