Anti-Phishing Education Messaging

The APWG has an amazing new initiative for educating consumers.  When a phish site is shut down, ISPs are asked to redirect any clicks to the APWG’s redirect education page instead of showing a 404 error. 

The power of this comes from leveraging the “teachable moment”: consumers are more likely to absorb a lesson if it is presented at the precise moment of the bad action (something my colleagues – Lorrie and PK – at CMU have studied in-depth).

This initiative is starting to get real traction.  Several brands are already participating and I’ve been contacted by many more this week to get started.  It’s a very exciting initiative to give consumers a consistent message from a group like the APWG at exactly the right time in the consumer’s online experience.  American Banker has published an article about it (warning – you have to have a subscription to see the article – sorry).

In a similar vein, another colleague – Dave Piscitello – has a blog post on anti-phishing messaging on Gaia.  It’s great to see anti-phishing messaging is getting to be more pervasive, especially given that the threats are very real.

Finally, for those of you attending the APWG conference next week, there is a cool video – it gives an overview of the topics to be covered in Barcelona.