Carnegie Mellon's Online Game Helps People Recognize Internet Scams, Phishing

Everyone Can Play and Win a Gift Certificate

The internet is packed with scams all aimed at parting you from your hard earned money. And there are thousands of people who fall for them every day of the week. Now computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have invented an interactive and online game staring a fish name Phil. He teaches people how to recognize and thereby avoid email phishing and the other Internet scams.

The game is called Anti-Phishing Phil. People who spent just 15 minutes playing the game, were better able to identify the fraud sites that people who had spent the same amount of time reading anti-phishing tutorials or other training materials available on line.

Now the team wants to give Phil a real test and they are asking the public to help. They are asking the public to visit http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/antiphishing_phil/ and click on the "Play the game!" link. Participants will be asked to take a short quiz, play the game and then take another quiz.

And there is a bonus to it too. Anyone who leaves their e mail address and participates in a follow up quiz a week later will be entered into a drawing for a $100 Amazon.com gift card

Practically everyone who has an e mail address has received at least one phishing attack at one point or another. These are e mails that try and trick you into revealing personal information, bank account numbers or credit card information. They often pretend to be from banks and credit card companies and other legitimate businesses, such as on line payment processors. The email sends you to a web site that looks like one from the company, but it is fake and when you put in your information, you give it to scammers.

There is a great deal of debate going on between security experts about whether or not education has any effect in reducing a persons vulnerability to phishing attacks. However, the results of this study show that training can improve the ability to be able to identify which web sites are legitimate and which are not. Specifically Anti-Phishing Phil proved very effective. He was able to improve the users' accuracy from 69% prior to training to 87% after playing the game.