According to a Gallup poll, Americans worry more about getting hacked than they do about any other crime:
Americans are more afraid of getting hacked than they are of getting mugged
David Ramos/Getty Images
(Gallup)
69 percent of Americans worry about their credit cards being hacked and 62 percent worry about the theft of data from their computers — far higher than the share who report worrying about more grievous crimes such as burglary and murder.
Americans’ fears aren’t wholly unfounded. There have been a number of large-scale attacks in recent years, compromising millions of user’s data. The chart below shows how many millions of users have been affected by the biggest data breaches on record:
This is the first Gallup poll to ask about hacking worries, and thus the firm has no historical data to show when or how quickly it came to dominate Americans' fears. But these statistics do reflect the increase in cybercrime and decline in other crimes in recent years. As the rate of violent crime has gradually decreased over the past 20 years, security breaches among businesses have gone up.
85 percent of households earning above $75,000 a year reported worrying about a credit card hack, as opposed to only 50 percent of households earning under $30,000 a year. Hacking typically worries people from higher income groups more because they are likelier to have access to credit cards and cloud computing.
