Phishing attacks are pretty cleverly designed, because they skip
most virus checkpoints altogether and go for the true weak spot
in human-computer interaction, the human. Lorrie Faith Cranor, a
computer security researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, has
been studying phishing attacks to identify new ways to fight
them. Some of the things her research team has learned: - Users
who are simply taught about phishing attacks don’t retain the
info and keep falling for them, but users who are tricked into
falling for a phishing attack first and then taught show far
greater retention—it’s a “teachable moment” in the researchers’
terminology. (Idea: when phishers are caught, their punishment
is to have them continue to phish but on behalf of government
entities in order to create these “teachable moments.”) - Even
when web browsers warned users they were on a phishing site,
many ignored the warnings. People who used IE 7 were more likely
to ignore warnings than people who used Firefox 2. You might
assume this is b