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.
Comments on “Playing Whack A Phish”
4% of people detect 100% of phishing emails
The ‘test’ presented may well be a measure of how most people deal with phishing emails in their email program, but what was presented left out far too much information to be really interesting.
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.