Why You Get Phished

how about being smart and don't give out your personal and financial information in an email that claims to be from a lawyer who represents a dead African royalty or Britain philanthropist who needs your personal and financial information to transfer to US bank account then will give you large percentage for your "help"?

this is 21st Century and a new millennium, dammit!!

stop being a internet noob in an age of instant knowledge with Google, Wikipedia, and/or Bing...

transfer their money

Trust no-one. Especially when you can't see them.

Why would your bank need to email you? I have accounts at a few different banks and I don't recall ever getting an email from them.

So, the study concluded that the more information you exchange online the more likely you are to get phished.
Duh... who would have thought of it...

Giving our personal information online is worse than yelling your social security number at the top of your lungs in a crowded area.... because people my forget, computers dont.

Morale of the story... dont be stupid.

You got that one too!!! I wish I'd hear back..... ;-)

I've received phishing emails before, but quite honestly I can't imagine how people actually fall for them. The grammar is usually atrocious, the claims outlandish, and it shouldn't take much judgement to realise that the emails are fake. Granted that judgement must be in short supply as the phishers and scammers wouldn't keep doing it unless they got enough people responding.

I remember one particular message that I received via Facebook tried to tell me a relative I'd never heard of in Africa had just died and that they left me quite a bit of money. People just really need to use/learn common sense. If you've never heard of the person messaging you and the claims seem odd, then don't reply. Mark it as spam and/or delete it.

Woot! Brock University!!!

I like responding to them. See if I can get any information out of them. Hasn't worked yet, but it's a good timewaster. Something for me to do, and something to waste their time. They're usually horrible though. They respond using different names for themselves, and even called me a couple of random names.

IMHO, use a service like www.sneakemail.com It lets you create an e-mail address for any purpose, then forwards e-mail received at that address to your "real" e-mail. The number of e-mail addresses that you can create is unlimited. If you get spam on any one, you can delete just that address. IMHO, works great.

of course the more you use the internet the more spam you get, didnt you gusy know that most sites sell your details to other companies

And i really resent the idea of clients being at fault for this.
nobody seems to remember a short while ago when Epsilon had an "incident" in which a lot of their clients' e-mail addresses got "lost" or "hacked" (read: Epsilon employee got rich quickly). I for one know that I do not give my email address to these scumbags for sure, so how do they get it? From firms that are supposed to be very secure and safe in terms of safekeeping my info (which they got from third parties, like banks and other institutions that we HAVE to deal with). So, I would appreciate some objectivity when assigning blame. I am pretty sure almost nobody on this forum gave away his email address just like that, and we are not PC noobs, and yet everybody gets phishing emails.
Does anyone here still believe in that little disclaimer that says "your e-mail address is never shared with third party companies" or something of that nature? How can one verify that? Utter BS, if you ask me.

..and you needed a University study to tell you this? What next: walking in a park significantly increases your chance of treading in dog sh*t?!

I would not be suprised if some companies "hack" their own e-mail address databases so they can sell them to others. Welcome to capitalism.

Did they all send each other spam to find out?

Using multiple email accounts is a good way to manage the email letters that you receive, and it could reduce the risk of being phished.

If you happen to stand in front of the nozzle when i fired the gun, it's basically your fault. Ok, that's taking it too extreme. But i agree that you just have to be extra careful when online, especially with anonymous or unknown entities.

Dumb research. Let's talk statistics.... the more you use your email the more likely your address will be obtained by spammers.

The causes are:
(1) spamming bots (in general viruses which are able to read contacts and then disclosing all contacts of the infected host);
(2) information leak on service host (some company or internet service which requested your email as a term of service might leak personal data at a certain point or even sell it for money);
(3) public mail (whoever chooses to make one's mail address visible for any reason will eventually have to deal with hundreds of unwanted mail every day).

Is this study from 2002 or something? Who doesn't know this stuff by now?

Im sorry to tell you this (I didnt read all of the comments so idk if someone else has corrected you yet) but it is University at Buffalo, not of.

Also this seems like a waste of time/money by the schools....

I'm pretty much a lurker on most sites and I have a dedicated spam account that I use for signing up for user accounts on sites. Both of those keep me relatively safe from spam on my main accounts.

And LOL @ the spam that is (or was, depending on how fast it is removed) above my comment on an article about spam.

My thumbs up for the lolz







I use www.mailinator.com for these purposes. Works great, no need to check and sign up. I just give the site whatever@mailinator.com and go to mailinator and check the "whatever" account that just gets created when the first mail reaches there and stays for a couple of hours. And if the site needs a new address, I go whatever20110412@mailinator.com or something unique based on date so I don't have to think about what new address can I get.

I have found out that no mater how much I try to teach people to use BCC when they mass forward mail, and to be kind and remove the previous mass forward lists, people still use TO or CC. They "nod in understanding" when I try to teach them, but eventually stop sending me forwards on funny things they found out (or those "send it to 25 friends" mail forwards) instead of actually learning. Those lists tend to grow huge and are made of people who use their e-mail addresses. Let one of the recipients be malevolent or spammer and there, a bunch of people gullible probably and that will be reading the spam and fall for it maybe.

The worst type of mass e-mail of harvesting e-mail addresses: "send it to all your friends and to xx@yy.com and for every mail sent there, ZZ company will give 0.01 c to that cancer sick girl/boy and their family".
*sighs*

What!? You guys must have a really really low level at which you call someone competent in computing.
Someone who is called competent in computing knows from a mile away to look at where links in emails go before you click them, read the full email headers and backtrack sender's ip, and look at the domains links go to, if you are asked sensitive information, and above all you never ever send unencrypted mails with sensitive information, if you ever send it.

I think you guys are stupid for not accepting the King of Africa's incredible offer. He just e-mailed me and said my check for 800 trillion dollars is in the mail. Now who's stupid??

Someone who uses e-mail every day as part of the job but still can't tell spam and clicks on links like that, *sighs*, best not carry on their genes to the next generation.
p.s. my sigh is because it won't happen.

While there are many women I know that are better than many men I know at technical things, they are still an extremely small percentage exception to the average women. Moral of my story: even though I don't like gender prejudice, statistically it stands as you say.

There was another post here, or am I wrong?
@doped
There is something wrong in this thread, I guess in the bombardment from spam, the moderators might have deleted your post, maybe some false positive, maybe just did not like the opinion