Playing Whack A Phish
from the spot-the-phish dept
The latest look at phishing scams notes that only 4% of people were able to correctly spot 100% of phishing emails -- but the news might not be as bad as it sounds. On average, people caught 75% of phishing emails, up from 61% a year ago -- suggesting that people are definitely a lot more attuned to the potential for phishing. Of course, this is based on a self-selecting group who took the test, and they're obviously a lot more likely to be aware of phishing attempts. While the article goes on about the importance of doing more to secure against phishing, the real indictment should be for companies that still send out legitimate emails that look just like phishing attempts.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
4% of people detect 100% of phishing emails
For example, no email headers were available, not background history of similar emails to the account - all that was presented was the HTML version of the email as an image. So you couldn't even mouseover links to see where they went.
Interesting survey, yet very flawed.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]