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A human being cannot replace anti-spam

Read: 23869 Comments: 10 Rating: 15

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Experience shows that many users don't buy anti-spam software. Their rationale is this: An anti-virus that has no anti-spam is cheaper. Besides, I don’t get many spam messages, and it’s easy to recognise and delete them.

Meanwhile, a survey involving 933 individuals, who were asked questions about phishing, revealed that:

Only 5% of the people managed to answer all the questions correctly.

Source

And it turned out that the situation has deteriorated over time.

In the period between 2015-2018, the overall number of phishing victims increased by 59%.

Source

The actual number of victims is growing despite the fact that people appear to be aware of the danger.

As many as 96% of the survey participants did know about phishing. Eighty-eight percent of the respondents were able to match phishing with the definition of "unsolicited email, text messages, and phone calls purportedly from a legitimate company requesting personal, financial, and/or login credentials."

Source

So, few people are completely unaware of phishing attacks:

Meanwhile, 30% said they didn't believe phishing occurred on social media sites. Only 2% of the respondents said they didn't believe phishing took place via email. Aside from emails and social media, scammers also infect devices and gather personal information. From copying keystrokes and watching every page opened to making recordings via the camera and microphone, malware gives hackers access to everything. Despite the severity, 47% of the respondents said they don't believe phishing can take place over fraudulent software. And 43% of the respondents believed that ads were safe.

Source

And that is despite the fact that social media sites are rife with scams.

Phishing awareness also varies between different generations:

While baby boomers associated phishing with email, 41% didn't believe it could be done over social media, and nearly 60% percent didn't associate phishing with fraudulent software. On the other hand, while 3% of millennials didn't believe phishing could occur over email, three-fourths said it could happen over social media, and 56% percent thought it could take place through fraudulent software.

Source

And here is why being educated is important:

Those who got every question right were 31 percentage points more likely to say that they avoid phishing scams by distrusting any email with typos.

Source

#email #spam #phishing

The Anti-virus Times recommends

Don't underestimate the threat of spam and phishing attacks—fraud schemes can be rather sophisticated. This issue's author has seen phishing emails that looked exactly like legitimate ones. Therefore:

  1. Use anti-spam technologies.
  2. Even if no spam appears in your mailbox, don't lose your focus, because fraudsters can get to you at any moment. Be careful. One day you may receive an email that appears to be from someone you know well, but it isn’t from that person.

[Twitter]

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