F-Secure is coming over all chivalrous: the security firm has decided to take us little ladies by the hand, and help the weaker sex manoeuvre the confusing and complicated world of online security.

This support comes in the form of a press release that landed in my inbox, and despite it lacking anything pink or pretty, I actually bothered to read it.  According to a survey by F-Secure and a “research” firm called OnePoll1:

• one in five women have had credit-card details stolen online;

• two thirds don’t check online store security logos;

• and 84% don’t check a website’s safety rating before using it.

Shocking stats, indeed. I can barely get my pretty little head around them.

All this time, I’d thought I was relatively safe online; I’ve yet to be hacked or have my card details stolen. Despite my body containing a uterus, I’ve always thought I was rather web savvy, working as I do for the UK’s finest tech publication, yet I don’t check for logos or ratings: I look for HTTPS and use my common sense (I’m not sure there’s a logo for that).

Now, as F-Secure’s “research” didn’t poll any men, we don’t know whether women are better or worse than the masculine half of the population when it comes to checking these very important security logos and ratings. So I did my own survey, of the men working on tech magazines in Dennis Towers.

And my, the results are just as shocking: 91% of those asked never check “site security logos” — several didn’t even know what they were, instead watching out for HTTPS and that cute little padlock in the browser — and another 91% never check a site’s “safety rating”. Only one could name a site that lists such ratings (something the press release didn’t bother to do).

It would seem it’s not only women that are the problem here; F-Secure needs to focus its protective glare on male tech journalists too.

Sex and shopping

I’m going to set my gleeful sarcasm aside for a moment, as much fun as it is, as I come to another pair of stats from the “research”. F-Secure also asked women if they’d had unprotected sex in the past year — apparently, 70% haven’t.

Aside from the fact that unprotected sex is not necessarily a bad thing — couples do it, that’s where babies come from, and babies are nice — it suggests that promiscuous women are expected to be stupid online, as though there’s a connection between your sex life and shopping.

F-Secure also found that 75% of women would never use an unlicensed taxi, an odd question for an online security firm.

This is why they asked those two questions: “The results show a marked contrast between the way women act online compared to offline. Women in the UK are very savvy in their day-to-day activities, generally acting responsibly and having a high awareness of their personal safety. However, they appear to be dropping their guard when they log on to their computers,” said Toni Kempson-Vicars, marketing director UK & Ireland for F-Secure.

Yes, F-Secure, I am more concerned about contracting AIDS, having an unplanned, life-changing pregnancy, or being raped and murdered by a dodgy mini-cab driver than I am about online security.

Sound advice for everyone

Don’t get me wrong: the advice offered by F-Secure is all perfectly sound (if a bit over the top in places) and will surely be useful to many women. I’d be happy to see the tips run in women’s magazines, for example, to spread the knowledge beyond those reading tech websites. However, I’d also like it shared out to, say, sports magazines — or whatever it is that’s read by men who aren’t the type to pick up PC Pro.

But I’m just a woman; what do I know? So I asked F-Secure’s PR for an explanation.

“Whilst it’s true that these issues affect everybody, the aim of the campaign is to increase awareness among women of the dangers they face online and the steps they can take to make themselves safe,” I was told. “We’re hoping to make 2011 the year women are safe online and create a sisterhood theme around the issue.”

But why? I can’t help but wonder why women are the focus, and not simply everyone. To me, F-Secure’s campaign suggests that women need more help than men — and if that’s not that case, I look forward to seeing a safety campaign directed solely at men, too.

There’s something in the air. In fact, look closely and you can see it. Up there, white and fluffy, and apparently full of exciting new technology. You see, all the best new technologies are moving to the cloud, and if you haven’t moved your data to the cloud yet… well, heaven forfend.

I’ve just deleted filed two press releases in the space of two minutes that sell themselves on the back of cloud computing. The first was from respected backup specialists EMC: “EMC has today announced its first major step into cloud computing as EMC Mozy and Lenovo will now offer unlimited online backup for SMBs” to quote the first line – head to Lenovo’s Protect My Data site for details.

The second is from F-Secure, which has just launched Wellbeing 2009, its new and trendier name for its suite of security products: Internet Security 2009, Anti-Virus 2009 and Home Server Security 2009.

Apparently, with this release “F-Secure is the only anti-virus vendor to have an ‘in the cloud’ real-time protection network deployed globally”.

Now I don’t dispute for a second the marvellousness of both these new sets of technologies, but the brutal reality is that the first has very little to back up its cloud claims. So far as I can see, it’s another online backup service (and don’t get me wrong, because Mozy is among the best).

This is in stark contrast to the F-Secure press release, where the cloud computing tag is completely justified. The central idea is that any PCs protected with F-Secure take a “fingerprint” of any files that are suspected of being malicious.

F-Secure’s ferocious fleet of servers then analyse the file and if it’s suspicious they’ll feed that information to all the other PCs protected by F-Secure’s technology (DeepGuard, to give it its marketing spin).

The problem is, cloud computing is just going to become another marketing term used without any great thought to describe any service delivered over the internet. And in the end, all that will happen is that people will get confused and ignore it.

Which is a shame, as real cloud computing is – as that F-Secure example shows – a very powerful thing.