Kaspersky Lab took a detailed look into security trends recently and revealed these to the press about a month ago when htxt.africa was in Russia.

And the news is not good.

The report says that upwards of 25% of the world’s consumers have reported a malware incident in the past year, 14% have reported at least one hacking incident within the same timeframe and that one in every 20 users (5% of the sample) could confirm they had lost a personal file as a result of one of these kinds of attacks.

How are these threats presenting themselves?

Kaspersky says 40% of all users have received a strange, anonymous e-mail or a suspicious file attached to an e-mail in the past year, and that 7% of all of the world’s users had lost a digital device that may or may not have had adequate data protection installed, but almost certainly had personal information stored on it.

A fair amount of data loss can be chalked up to basic user neglect.

Alexander Erofeef, Kaspersky’s Chief Marketing Officer says that 54% of the customers surveyed said they don’t take any special steps (outside of the setting up of a password) to protect their personal, digital information and that almost all of those users confess to readily sharing these passwords with friends and family members.

What’s worrying is that the report says 35% of all users have a single password for all of their accounts.

That means – as a criminal – if you have one password, you have them all.

It’s not surprising then, that according Erofeef, 36% of all malware incidents resulted in financial loss of one or another kind.

Most commonly however, Erofeef admits, financial losses are attributed to the user having to contract the services of a professional to recover the lost data.

The biggest incidence of nefarious digital activity over the past few years has been in the mobile sector – something that’s not all that surprising if we consider how well tablet sales have fared all over the world and how quickly smartphones are replacing feature phones – in all sectors of the market.

Erofeef says that a mere 40% of smartphones and 24% of Android tablets have any form of security services installed on them today.

He says Kaspersky started looking into the mobile malware space roughly a decade ago. And until recently, he says, mobile wasn’t big.

In fact, between 2004 and 2010, the company collected in the region of 1000 separate pieces of malicious code aimed at mobiles.

In 2011, Kaspersky discovered 6000 new samples of malware. In 2012, 46 000 new samples were discovered. And in the first six months of 2013, that number had already been eclipsed with 51 000 completely new threats being identified for mobile phones and tablets.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the threats outlined in Kaspersky’s research are targeted at the Android platform, because the level of curatorship Google applies to its Play marketplace is far less serious… and users are free to install applications from third party players outside of the app store environment (a practice commonly referred to as side loading).

Every other smartphone and tablet vendor limits application installation capabilities to its app store alone and in doing so, dramatically cuts down on the number of threats its platform needs to fend off.

But, says Stefan Tenase, a Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky, that’s not to say that Apple iOS, Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone are free from threat.

Smartphone and tablet users often connect to free public WiFi and Tanase says this is a bad idea. That’s because the traffic between the various devices on the network and the router can be compromised.

Some security measures don’t help. For example, he says, WEP – the kind of security used in more than half of the free public WiFi services available today – can be cracked by criminals in a matter of minutes.

Additionally, Tanase says a large number of mobile applications make use of insecure protocols – http instead of https; and ftp instead of sftp – an oversight that leaves those applications’ traffic open to interception, compromise, and worse, session hijacking.

“Whatsapp up until a few months ago was using insecure transferring protocols for transferring messages and data. And Yahoo messenger still uses plain text to transfer instant messages,” Tanase explains.

Despite there being good safeguards in place to ensure Apple’s platform remains safe from malware, Tanase says Kaspersky expects there to be a rise in Apple malware that infiltrates the user’s PC first and compromises the user’s backup data, which is stored on the hard disk each time a synchronization takes place.

It’s a scary world out there – best we all start thinking a little more seriously about security and particularly, on mobile.