The data was released on Thursday by the EU's statistical office, Eurostat, and showed that 14% of the 6,624 Portuguese nationals surveyed on the use of information technology in the second quarter of last year had been targeted in the previous 12 months by phishing, i.e. they received fraudulent emails aimed at gaining undue access to personal and/or confidential data.

Some 11% of Portuguese respondents (who, as in the rest of Europe, were between 16 and 74 years old) said they had been confronted in recent times with pharming, i.e. e-mails that directed them to false sites so that there was also undue access to personal information such as keywords and account numbers.

These two types of attacks have already led banking institutions in Portugal to issue alerts to their customers.

To carry out this study, Eurostat surveyed these Portuguese citizens between 29 April and 26 July of last year.

Other European Union (EU) citizens were also heard at this time, with a total of 202,511 people surveyed in the 28 member states and 147,531 households.

The EU's statistics service asked everyone questions about security problems with internet access on devices such as computers, tablet PCs, mobile phones and others.

To a lesser extent, Portuguese respondents admitted that in the 12 months preceding the study, they had lost documents, photographs or other data from their devices due to viruses (3%), as well as found fraudulent use of their bank cards (1%).

The Portuguese citizens claimed to have suffered from identity theft on the internet, the misuse of personal information available online and hacking into their social network accounts or others (all 1%).

To try to avoid this kind of cases, Portuguese respondents said they had recently avoided providing personal information to online platforms (25%), ordering goods or services over the internet (20%), accessing bank accounts this way (17%), downloading apps, music, videos or games (17%) or using open Wi-Fi networks (15%) and had tried not to communicate in this way with public services or administrations (8%).