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Comment Antivirus for Your Brain (Immunization) (Score 5, Insightful) 113

When we were kids, many of us received immunizations against a host of nasty diseases. The purpose of these vaccines was to expose our immune systems to "fake badness," so that when we were exposed "real badness," the immune system would be pre-primed to deal with it.

Phishing is a problem precisely because most of the email that your average (l)user gets and most of the sites they visit are legitimate, with no badness (of this type) involved. When you've never been exposed to phishing behavior, it's much easier to fall for a scam.

You can run all the "awareness" campaigns you want, but users tend to ignore that sort of stuff, thinking, "right, I get it, but I'm smarter than that."

We need to inoculate users to teach them to be wary. There should be more sites like this out there. Some geared toward credit card data, some geared toward username & password, and others yet for other forms of PII.

Once a user is brought up short a few times by information pages like you see after you hit submit, they will be more cautious on all sites.

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