‘Non-experts rarely see patches as the main means of security’

Respondents who were not Internet experts cited patches as one of the most important ways to protect the computer in a Google survey in only two percent of cases.

Internet users who are not experts do not see system updates as a top priority to protect the computer against malware, the internet giant concludes. In another group of respondents, whom Google labels as experts, 35 percent of respondents said they see installing software patches as one of the top three ways to keep the computer safe. This is evident from a research paper that Google put online on Thursday.

The percentage of 2 comes from what people see as the top three ways to stay “safe” online. Experts cite using unique passwords and employing two-factor authentication as the most important factors in addition to updating the system, while the non-experts came up with using antivirus, using strong passwords, and visiting only well-known websites.

Google surveyed 230 experts and 294 non-experts, which it found through Amazon Mechanical Turk. All respondents lived in the United States and had already completed at least 500 tasks on the Amazon service.