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"Hey Dad, let's go Phishing"

  • Article

My son, Blake, is 3 years old, and on Saturday, for the first time in his little life he picked up and used a fishing rod. We were on a friend's boat on Lake Washington all day, and Blake simply loved using it. I have to admit, I kinda cheated by tying a plastic yellow fish to the end of the line, so we wouldn't have to take him to the emergency ward if he got a hook through his (or someone elses!) nose. But at least he caught a fish every time!

Personally, I find fishing about as exciting as watching golf, watching tennis, sitting through long compiles, watching grass grow or watching paint dry.

Phishing, on the other hand is of great interest to me.

So how good are you at spotting phishing attacks?

https://www.n15th.com/cgi-bin/MailFrontier/quiztest.cgi?themailfrontierphishingiqtest

Oh, if you do get a fishhook through your nose, the first aid is to:

  1. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PULL THE HOOK OUT!!!!!
  2. Take a pair of pliers
  3. Push the hook through the skin, 'til the barb pops out next to the entry point.
  4. Snip the barb off the hook
  5. Pull the 'neutered' hook out.

Now, you know!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2004
    For what it's worth, the link on that page that lets you receive a Top 10 report asks for your email address but has no privacy policy in sight.

    By the way... I hope that your knowledge about pulling fishhooks out of noses is not based on firsthand info.
  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2004
    I went to the site - and did not see anything prompting me to enter my email address. What's the URL you're looking at?

    As for the first aid - no I read about it when I was a kid :)
  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2004
    I think the URL Ilya is referring to is http://survey.mailfrontier.com/survey/request10tips.html, which is available when you complete the quiz.

    Interesting quiz. I managed 9/10, having missed the first question. My having missed it, however, suggests to me that perhaps Hotmail needs to change their emails to look less like Phishing. ;-)

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2004
    9/10. I thought (incorrectly) the Earthlink one looked genuine, but then I'm not an Earthlink customer.
  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2004
    Wow, 10/10 - I guess I got sufficiently paranoid by now... :-)
  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2004
    Very cool. 10/10. I was surprised at how many of these have actually landed in my inbox.
  • Anonymous
    July 30, 2004
    I agree with Andrew. One of the most peculiar things about some of the account-related e-mails I receive are those that (1) use HTML mail formats, and (2) along with all of the advice about how to access their site safely, provide a link for my easy use in going right to my account page. Duhhh? Is this a test? This kind of dissonance demonstrates to me the difficulty of establishing and then maintaining customer security and safety as job one across a business culture.

    With regard to cultivating the basic suspicious nature that is required to even notice phishing before doing anything regrettable, I want to recommend the quiz that Dan Appleman has on his site, <http://www.alwaysuseprotection.com>. I also recommend Dan's new book. Dan was at Thursday's geek dinner and he'll also be at the Bellevue Square Borders for another signing at 3pm Sunday, August 1. The book is a great gift for teachers who work with computer classes. It's also a nice read, and valuable for parents with computer-aware teens.
  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2004
    Well, a preview mechanism would be great here. Instead, I will slip-stream patches, OK?

    The Dan Appleman site is http://www.alwaysuseprotection.com and I won't even try to put polite angle brackets around the URL.
  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2004
    The comment has been removed