Have you received an email stating a violation of terms of service for an online game or social network you use? What about an ‘unauthorised’ attempt to use your banking or credit card information? Perhaps you ‘won’ a contest you never entered? Regardless of the scenario, all of these emails probably asked you to click on something to ‘verify’ your credentials. Hopefully you did not as each is a common example of a phishing scam, a type of online fraud that tries to trick you into revealing personal financial information, passwords, credit card numbers, etc. As with the noted examples most phishing cases take the form of an email message claiming to come from a seemingly legitimate source, but just how good do you think you are at recognising a phishing scam?

Take a few minutes to complete the SonicWALL Phishing and Spam IQ Quiz (Dell, 2012). How many did you get right? Which of the examples seemed hardest to decide about? What specific things did you notice that helped identify a message as a fraud? What specific things led you to be fooled? For this Discussion, share your results from the SonicWALL test and explain the methods you employed to decipher what was fraud and what was not.

Dell. (2012) SonicWALL phishing IQ test[Online]. Available from: http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing/ (Accessed: 08 January 2015).

To complete this Discussion:

Post: Create an initial post in which you share your results from the SonicWALL Phishing and Spam IQ Quiz. Include how many questions you answered correctly. Your score will not have any effect on your grade. In your post, also evaluate which examples in the test were hardest to decide about and explain why. Furthermore, explain what methods you utilised to identify a message as fraud. Based on the specific things that fooled you, evaluate your methods and recommend what you could have done differently to avoid being fooled.