With every bit of digital life now in your palm, how much do you trust your smartphone’s security? A Kaspersky survey has found that 72% of respondents in the Asia-Pacific region, including Malaysia, consider their smartphone their primary device for accessing the internet, pushing the PC into a secondary role. As the volume and sensitivity of data stored on phones continues to grow, users’ security habits have not kept pace, the cybersecurity company points out.
Kaspersky: Malaysians Tend To Keep Sensitive Data In Smartphones
Across the region, 65% of respondents store personal photos and videos on their smartphones, while 57% store contact details and 50% keep text messages and chat histories. Nearly half (49%) store personal documents such as identification cards, passports, or insurance documents. Smartphones are also increasingly used for work, with 47% of respondents storing work emails and 31% storing work calendars, while 38% store banking details and 34% save passwords and login credentials. A newer category, AI chat histories, is stored by 27% of respondents.
Malaysian respondents reported storing an even broader range of information compared to the regional average, including work emails (52%), notes and reminders (46%), shopping information (49%), AI chat histories (31%), and access to work systems (22%). The survey was conducted by Kaspersky’s market research center in March 2026, with 7,200 respondents across 18 countries, including Malaysia.
It’s pretty common knowledge that PCs often use dedicated security solutions, especially in the corporate environments – though such is not always the case for smartphones (which, to be fair, enjoys the benefit of inherently safer OS designs by the likes of Google and Apple). Contrary to popular belief, mobile devices do require the same level of protection as PCs, if not even more so, as we increasingly rely on them to perform financial-related functions.
For its part, Kaspersky recommends that no data should exist solely on a phone, advising users to maintain backups or cloud sync and to store sensitive information such as passwords, IDs, or financial details in a protected format, such as a password manager with a secure vault feature. The company also recommends mobile cybersecurity protection solutions, noting its own offering blocked more than 18.8 million web-based cyber threats in Malaysia in 2025, averaging over 51,000 attempted malicious incidents daily.
For loss prevention, Kaspersky also recommends enabling location services for remote device tracking and data wiping, setting up automatic backups, configuring instant auto-lock, and keeping devices physically secure in public spaces. You can find out more on the latest threats and cybersecurity developments on the company’s dedicated blog for smartphone OSes by clicking on this text.
Pokdepinion: It’s perhaps a blessing that smartphones are as safe as they are thanks to their relatively closed-box designs, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% safe – which is what eventually will catch people off guard.
