People Continue to fall to Phishing Scams, says F-Secure

Security company F-Secure (located in Finland) conducted its yearly survey 'Online Wellbeing' and published the results of its study. According to the survey, a mean of 54% of respondents felt quite sure that they would be able to recognize phishing e-mails and would not be ensnared into them. This suggests that over 45% of respondents continue to be incapable of detecting such e-mails and are most likely to fall to phishing scams.

The survey involved 2,019 Internet users between the age of 20 and 40 years from eight countries (Canada, USA, U.K, Germany, France, Italy, Hong Kong and India), with about 200 respondents polled in each country.

Sharing the results, the security company said that a mean of about 27% of US respondents were not sure of whether they can recognize fraudulent, phishing e-mails.

Moreover, the study found that in Hong Kong, 26% of the survey participants think they can't recognize phishing e-mails. On the other hand, in countries like the UK (68%), Italy (67%) and Canada (60%) respondents said they were much more confident in recognizing such e-mails, implying that still 35% of Internet users in these nations would fall to phishing scams.

Besides the issue of phishing e-mails, the survey also discovered that most respondents feel they are safe while banking online than while shopping through their credit cards. The countries with the greatest confidence in safe online banking are the US and France while in Germany, 39% are still less confident about online banking.

Theoretically, a large 31% of respondents continue to have a sense of insecurity with respect to Internet banking. It means Internet users are not sure and that they wish to avoid Internet scams such as phishing e-mails.

Regional Director Lee for F-Secure Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong, states that there also exists a great deal of uncertainty in carrying out financial transactions, but it appears these sentiments are not quite based on a fair comprehension of the actual threats, as reported by NETWORKWORLD on March 12, 2009.

Lastly, the study indicates that people's perception about Internet security has not changed much.

Related article: Paypal – Web Hosting Services Need To Work Hard To Tackle Phishing

» SPAMfighter News - 3/18/2009