Anti-Phishing Phil Aims To Educate

A new game developed at Carnegie Mellon University educates users on phishing threats.

It’s hardly a secret that phishing is one of the biggest problems facing computer users these days. Phishing attacks are becoming more sophisticated – just think of the one launched lastmonth against Monster.com users – and there are also many who don’t understand exactly what phishing is.   However, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are aiming to change that. They’ve developed an online game called Anti-PhishingPhil which is intended to both entertain and educate.   In a statement on the site, researchers said,   “Our user studies have found that user education can help prevent peoplefrom falling for phishing attacks. However, it is hard to get users to read security tutorials, and many of the available online training materials make users aware of the phishing threat but do notprovide them with enough information to protect themselves. Our studies demonstrate that Anti-Phishing Phil is an effective approach to user education.”   In testing, people who spent aslittle as 15 minutes playing the game could better identify phishing threats by being able to more readily identify the bogus URLs all too often used in phishing scams. And if you want to give it ashot and improve your anti-phishing skills, testing is ongoing, and you could win a $100 gift certificate from Amazon.   CMU is also partnering with PortugalTelecom to develop a Portuguese version of the game, known as Anti-Phishing Ze.