14 DAY TRIAL // When people are tired, they tend not to think too much about what they’re doing. According to experts, this also applies when it comes to surfing the web.
Cisco has analyzed the online behavior of Internet users from the United Kingdom. The company has found that, while most users avoid clicking on links that lead to malware during work hours, the number skyrockets after work hours and early in the morning.
The figures show that users exhibit the riskiest behavior between 4AM and 5AM. It’s uncertain if these people are night owls or early birds, but they’re 15.7 times more likely to come across a malicious website compared to the timeframe between 12PM and 1PM.
While between 8AM and 6PM most internauts in the UK appear to be alert, after they go home, they tend to forget about common sense and their cyber security training.
As expected, the lowest number of malware blocks are recorded between 12PM and 1PM, when it’s lunch time, and between 5PM and 6 PM, when people leave the workplace.
“Understanding these patterns of behaviour is key to addressing the propensity for users to engage in risky behaviour,” Cisco’s Martin Lee noted in a blog post.
“Risky behaviour tends to drop during the working day, suggesting that users are less likely to click on malicious links when they are most alert, and when they are engaged in activities that do not expose them to malicious links. Outside of working hours, tired users change their behaviour, forget their training, and are most likely to click on malicious links.”
The research is based on the relative number of malware blocks recorded by Cisco for UK networks on November 11. Based on these figures, the company has calculated the number of malware blocks per URLs requested per hour of the day to determine the intervals in which users exhibit risky behavior.