'More Phish Out There Than We Thought'

Via ComputerWorld.

Phishers might be getting takers on as much as 14% of their trick messages -- a much higher percentage than previous estimates by network security watchers, according to a University of Indiana study.

The university's School of Informatics simulated phishing attacks on eBay customers because they are a popular target of online scams. The simulated attacks were conducted as part of research summarized in "Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments: A study of (ROT13) rOnl query features" [.pdf].

The researchers contextualized their findings about a surprisingly high number of phishing victims by noting that other research, such as a Gartner Inc. report that says about 3% of American adults are successfully targeted, might not take into sufficient account the number of people who won't admit to being duped.

More here.