TechnowledgeBase

Hot on the heels of the Are you a security wizard quiz, here’s yet another way to test your level of paranoia security awareness. This time, the area of awareness being tested is email phishing scams, and the tester is McAfee.

Check out the McAfee SiteAdvisor Phishing Quiz to see how good you are at spotting fake websites that can will steal your information and cause you a whole world of hurt if you’re not careful. There are also a couple of questions about email scams thrown in for good measure.

The real value of the quiz comes at the end, where you are given the correct answers with details on how you could have spotted the fakes. Study those details.

My opinion of the quiz?
…pretty tough, actually. The first thing I check when I’m inspecting a suspicious site is the URL address, and I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting trouble just based on that alone. But some of the questions didn’t have the URL visible, so you had to actually READ the page’s content to figure out if it was real or fake. Out of those must-read questions, most were easy to spot if you knew what to look for, but one or two were actually pretty convincing fakes. A couple of email questions will probably throw you if you don’t have a decent grasp of net-geekery, paranoia, or both. I don’t know what McAfee would consider a “passing” score, but with question difficulties that range from “too easy” to “OMG, they got me!”, I’d say that an average score would be around 6. But remember, all it takes is ONE fake site to get past your paranoia-filter, and your identity is hosed. So nothing short of a perfect 10 out of 10 questions correct is really “passing”.

Oh… my score? 9/10 scams spotted.

I failed.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Security and Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.