Phish me once, shame on me

You'd think that everybody would be wise to phishing tricks by now. But you'd be wrong.

A new study [1] by reseachers at Harvard and Berkeley showed that 90% of participants were fooled by a clever phish -- and this was while the participants were actively on alert for phishes.

By simply changing the spelling of Bank of the West from www.bankofthewest [2] to www.bankofthevvest [3], people were fooled into thinking they were on a real site. The researchers say Web site designers need to come up with a better way to help customers determine when a site is a phish.

Posted by Neal Weinberg (nweinberg@nww.com [4])