Larger companies initiated programs for training their employees on how to detect phishing attempts,despite the awareness given the accuracy is still low.
An online quiz designed to test users’ phishing knowledge reveals that the risk of a business suffering damage as a result of a fraudulent email is still far from being eliminated.
Created by McAfee, the quiz presents ten emails to the participants with phishing samples scattered, asking them to mark them as a valid or invalid email.
The quiz was launched to the public in May and more than 20,000 individuals in 48 countries took the test.
This was the statistics of the quiz conducted :
In most cases increased accuracy in spotting the deceit is also given by the regular type of email the user deals with on a daily basis.
The exercise wasn’t to compare familiar emails messages, some of which are real and others fake. Rather, the test was to detect whether emails that appear to come from familiar companies are phishing or legit. After all, most legitimate emails from familiar companies take on different forms, said McAfee .
The samples provided to the users included very familiar brands in the US, including LinkedIn, American Express, US Airways, eFax Corporate, Venmo, Standard Bank, Wells Fargo, UPS and PayPal.