Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw release email phishing quiz to teach people how to spot malicious emails.

Phishing is still one of the main ways that a cybercriminal gains access to your data. Back in 2017 Google Research produced a report in which they identified that 12.4 million individuals have potentially been the victim of phishing with over 1.9 billion usernames and passwords readily available on the black market. Earlier this month the British newspaper The Guardian reported on the largest collection of breached data with more than 770 million email addresses and passwords posted to a popular hacking forum in December 2017.  Unfortunately, 11% of us receiving phishing email are falling for it, and according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, phishing has been directly involved in 70% of data breaches last year.

There is some good news, however, in an aim to help users identify potentially harmful emails many of the popular cloud-based email providers have introduced proactive phishing and malware detection using Artificial Intelligence. Even with all this technology to help our users, education is still the #1 way to prevent your business from becoming a victim of a phishing email attack. That was why we got so excited when we discovered that Google had released a phishing quiz which aims to educate your users in the various techniques used in phishing emails.

 

The quiz walks you through several different types of phishing attacks, and a few legitimate ones, then explains what signs you should be looking for in order to identify legitimate or malicious emails. The quiz is based on real-world examples of recent successful phishing attacks, such as the famous email Russian hackers used against American political consultant John Podesta to gain access to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is also an example of a legitimate Google security alert which appeared to be a phishing attack, as well as a massive Google Doc phishing worm that hit around one million users.

The quiz is challenging, and even those who are well trained and vigilant may stumble, in fact, our very own Guru scored 7/8 on the quiz. So even the best of us can use this tool to brush up on our experience. Take the challenge and let us know how you get on.