Thursday, July 29, 2004

something phishy?

I just stumbled over this little test, it presents you with ten real email messages some of which are genuine service messages and some of which are "phishing" - which I gather is a term for a particular kind of spam designed to get you to part with sensitive information for fraudulent purposes.

Anyway the quiz is set up so that when you roll your mouse over a link it should display the link target, like (most mailer applications do) but it won't actually let you follow the link, you have to determine wether the message is legitimate or a fraud just from the contents of the email (including of course the link URL).

I got 8 right, wrongly identifying one legitimate mail as a fraud and one fraud as legit, which is not to say that I'd have been caught out by that one fraudster (having followed the link I'd like to think I'd have been tipped off by something on the site before handing over my details) but it's interesting that one of them got past what I thought was a pretty good first line of defense.

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