A new survey has found that 70% of Americans are concerned about the nation’s cyber security after an object identified as a Chinese spy balloon by the U.S. government was shot down near the Carolina coast.
According to research from IT company Electric provided by public relations firm Fractl, the survey included more than 1,000 Americans.
More than half of them (54%) said they are concerned about the number of objects that have been shot down over the U.S., including another that was recently shot down near Alaska. Republicans were more likely to be concerned (65%) than Democrats (50%).
“An overwhelming 81% of Americans believe the mysterious objects are coming from China, while 12% of other hypotheses for where these UAPs came from include the U.S. government and private entities,” said a summary of the survey. Most Americans surveyed (83%) believe the balloons were sent to collect counterintelligence.
Survey results also indicate that “an overwhelming majority of Americans are worried about the nation’s cybersecurity,” and that 35% said they would even pay higher taxes to fund increased cybersecurity measures.
“President [Joe] Biden has made cybersecurity a top priority for the Biden-Harris Administration at all levels of government,” according to the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security. In May 2021, Biden issued an executive order focused on strengthening the nation’s cybersecurity.
Just this week, DISH revealed in a public filing that a network outage “was due to a cyber-security incident,” and that the company became aware Monday that “certain data was extracted from the Corporation’s IT systems as part of this incident.”
The filing also said “it is possible the investigation will reveal that the extracted data includes personal information,” and that experts continue to evaluate the issue.
In addition to the significant percentage of survey respondents who were concerned about the nation’s cybersecurity, 69% said they are concerned about their own cybersecurity and 63% said they are concerned about TikTok “collecting their personal information for nefarious purposes.”
However, just 42% of those surveyed said they believe the government should ban TikTok. Out of this group, 51% were men.
Most of the survey respondents (56%) were millennials, 23% were Gen X, 11% were Gen Z and 10% were baby boomers. Most (48%) were Democrats, 20% were Republicans and 22% were Independents, with others identifying as something else.
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