Students and younger people going into IT support may not understand the true ramifications of having an insecure computer, it has been stated.

Managing director at GetSafeOnline.org Tony Neate said that people may think that because they are young, they are invincible, yet in reality everyone is susceptible to online fraud, hacking and viruses.

He stated that the younger generation just needed to take a couple of minutes out of their day to check such resources as those provided by the free website GetSafeOnline runs to highlight major security issues .

Mr Neate continued: "The kids are educated in relation to computers - spreadsheets, word processing, SQL [define?] databases - but not much security is talked about at all so they think they're experts but no one's ever talked to them about security."

According to the most recent research from Vanson Bourne on behalf of GetSafeOnline, ten per cent of people in the UK consider there to be no risks to their computer on the internet.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.