Phishing IQ Test

Chances are that in the past week youve received an e-mail in your inbox that pretends to be from your bank, e-commerce vendor, or other on-line site. Hopefully you[‘]ve realized that many times this e-mail is fake – a phishing e-mail. The sender phisher of these fake e-mails wants you to click on the link in the e-mail and go to a phishing Web site – which will look just like the Web site of the company being phished. Once on the phishers Web site they hope to obtain your account, financial, credit and even identity information. Of course not every e-mail you receive is a phish. In fact you should expect your bank or e-commerce vendor to send you legitimate e-mail. But how can you tell the difference? Well that[‘]s what the Phishing IQ test is all about – give it a try.

SonicWALL Phishing IQ Test

NewMexiKen scored six correct out of 10. Not very good.

The SonicWALL people seem to have a problem with apostrophes. Funny, because one of their clues to phishing is bad grammar.

According to Yahoo! News:

Both IE7 and Firefox have built-in antiphishing features designed to alert you when you’ve hit a fraudulent site. With Microsoft’s browser, antiphishing is turned on by default. Each Web site you visit is checked against a database maintained by Microsoft, and known frauds are blocked.

Firefox has two antiphishing options. With the first, the sites you visit are checked against a local database on your computer. With the second, the sites you visit are checked against a live database maintained by Google.

In the SmartWare test, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 blocked 690 known phishing sites, or 66.35 percent of the total. In contrast, Firefox blocked 78.85 percent when using a local antiphishing database and 81.54 percent when using the online database.

Note that testing was on Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 6 is much less secure. Upgrade to 7.