Have you ever received an email from a company in which the sender claimed to need your personal information, including social security numbers and credit card numbers? If you have, you have probably been a victim of 'phishing.' Hopefully, you were able to evaluate the email and realize that it was not a legitimate request of your information. Several people, however, do not realize the dangers of trusting their emails and fall prey to phishers.
Recently, Rachna Dhamija of Harvard University and Marti Hearst and J.D. Tygar of the University of California at Berkeley conducted a study on why phishing works. Even after years of warning about phishing, they found that a majority of their sample, more than 91 percent, fell victim to a carefully made phishing Web site. To read more about their study, you can read this article about why phishing works on CNET.
