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 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 to www.bankofthevvest, 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)