Incident Response, TDR

Majority of people unable to discern phishing emails from legitimate ones

A majority of people, nearly 80 percent, are unable to identify phishing scams, new survey results from Intel Security indicate.

The company showed more than 19,000 respondents from 144 countries real emails, both legitimate and fake, and then asked them to determine whether the emails were real or scams designed to gain personal information, CBS News reported. Eighty percent fell for at least one phishing email while only three percent received a perfect score.

The U.S. ranked 27th overall in its ability to identify phishing emails with Americans averaging 68 percent accuracy. Iowa-based respondents had the highest scores in the U.S.

France was the top performing country, followed by Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain.

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