Phishing IQ Test

Security, Spam 1 Minute

Can you tell the legitimate e-mail messages from scams? MailFrontier ‘s Phishing IQ Test is trickier than it looks. I got 10 out of 10 right, but I’ve also been studying this stuff for a long time and I can see how people can get fooled.

Be sure to click through the links on the results page to see what distinguishes the phishing attempts.

Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

Published

6 thoughts on “Phishing IQ Test”

  1. I got 9 out of 10. I answered Phishing Fraud to one that was Legitimate – though the Why answer mentions that ‘something’ on that page may raise a red flag (don’t want to spoil for anyone else taking the test).

  2. Pingback: Notizen » Blog Archive » To phish or not to phish?

  5. That’s not a good test.

    With only an image of the e-mail to go by, it’s very hard to tell – except that in most cases they leave a telltale domain.

    For example, I flagged the Capital One one wrongly as being a phish – If I had known that my name was Jon Doe, that Capital One was my bank, and that my account number did actually end with 7163, then I would be fine.

    http://www.mailfrontier.com/quiztest2/answers/why_q9.html

    I flagged the Washington Mutual One as legitimate – because the only way I would ever click deny is if I was a member of Washington Mutual One, and my name was as stated. I suppose that information can be rigged – but even if I did get it wrong and clicked, it’s the screens after that which will red-flag this as a phish.

    http://www.mailfrontier.com/quiztest2/answers/why_q4.html

    If this is the sort of testing that is being done which shows that only a tiny percentage of users can tell what a phishing scam is – no wonder it’s a tiny percentage.

Comments are closed.