I was browsing around and I incidently stumbled across an article from Wikipedia. Of course, I’ve done no research whatsoever on the figures that I am about to post here.

Broken Chair

So, according to Wikipedia on the topic of Financial Literacy:

In Australia, 67 per cent of respondents indicated that they understood the concept of compound interest, yet when they were asked to solve a problem using the concept only 28 per cent had a good level of understanding.

A British survey found that consumers do not actively seek out financial information. The information they do receive is acquired by chance, for example, by picking up a pamphlet at a bank or having a chance talk with a bank employee.

A Canadian survey found that respondents considered choosing the right investments to be more stressful than going to the dentist.

A survey of Korean high-school students showed that they had failing scores – that is, they answered fewer than 60 per cent of the questions correctly – on tests designed to measure their ability to choose and manage a credit card, their knowledge about saving and investing for retirement, and their awareness of risk and the importance of insuring against it.

A survey in the US found that four out of ten American workers are not saving for retirement.

Obviously, most people are financially illiterate. Now, the question that I have to ask is how well these figures apply to the information security sphere. I mean, if similar studies are made, would they reveal the current state of information security awareness, which imho is non-existent? Would they show that information security problems are rarely solvable with software because I believe that even with the latest patches and equipped with the latest security defense technologies, people are still hackable.