The pool is full of phish
Yeterday, I remarked that the continuing flood of phishing mails indicated that there were still plenty of suckers out there. It’s even worse than I thought. I came across an article today reporting a study of phishing success and what was found is dismaying:
Phishers might be getting takers on as much as 14 percent of their trick messages — a much higher percentage than previous estimates by network security watchers, according to a University of Indiana study.
The university’s School of Informatics simulated phishing attacks on eBay customers because they are such a popular target of online scams. The simulated attacks were conducted as part of research summarized in “Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments: A study of (ROT13) rOnl query features” (PDF format).
The researchers contextualized its findings about a surprisingly high number of phishing victims by noting that other research, such as a Gartner report that says about 3 percent of American adults are successfully targeted, might not take into sufficient account the number of people who won’t admit to being duped.
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