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July 17, 2007
If You Can Spell, You're Probably Safe from Phishing
... at least, that would seem to be the takeaway from McAfee's promotional quiz, which purports to test your ability to detect phishing scams.
On the way to receiving a congratulatory message certifying me as a "security guru," I was reminded that:
- People are evidently still falling for the obfuscatory URL trick.
- Some legitimate pages are so bad that one wonders why the company didn't fire all its Web designers and hire the phishers, ridding us of ugly, frightening sites and giving the criminals something to do.
- Phishers are god-awful spellers. But if bad spelling is a dead giveaway, at least one page in the quiz itself should send you fleeing from McAfee.com, lest you wake up in Nigeria missing a kidney with a pocket full of maxed credit cards.
That last leads me to wonder if I didn't stumble onto a carefully crafted phishing site designed to inflate my sense of security and make me a bigger mark.
Posted by mhall at 2:37 PM | Add Comment
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