Spot the phish
McAfee have a great ten question quiz to challenge whether or not you can spot phishing sites. Give it a go. I got 9 out of 10.
Once you finish, it shows you the answers, and how to spot the fake sites.
Of course, one of the problems is that a prime indication of a fake site is awkward or badly phrased wording. This, unfortunately, is not limited to fake web sites. While it isn’t generally a trait of big corporate web sites, that have professionals working on them, there’s any number of smaller businesses that have badly designed, misspelt or awkwardly-worded sites.
In most cases, it’s careful inspection of the URL that will indicate for sure if you’re talking to the right people. Some of the quiz examples excluded this information, to make you look for other signs, which was good. But in practice all browsers should be displaying the URL. Some older versions don’t do this on popup windows and so on, which is a problem… you can see it by right-clicking and looking at the properties of the page, but most people wouldn’t remember to do this consistently.
