Phishing Quiz: Can You Score a Perfect 10?

Time to sharpen your number 2 pencils and put on your thinking caps. I've got a quiz for you. McAfee, creator of SiteAdvisor, is testing your knowledge of phishing sites—sites that attempt to steal your personal information by impersonating bona fide web sites. (Please note that heavy traffic to this site may affect its performance, so if you aren't able to access it, try again later.)

The 10-question quiz presents two side-by-side views of pages from MySpace, PayPal, Amazon, AOL, and others. One is real, the other is a fraud. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to spot the fake. I consider myself pretty good at spotting a fraud or scam, and I scored 8 out 10. Not bad, but it only takes one phishing site to leave you feeling violated.

I'll get you started. Here are two screenshots of MySpace. Which one is real? (Hint: The non-authentic site tries to trick users by giving them an authentic looking, but not quite right domain name.) Clueless? Check out the answer at SiteAdvisor. Some of the other phishing sites in the test use incomplete words, poor grammar, and inconsistent capitalization. In other words, the better you are at copyediting, the better you are at spotting the fake.

According to the Gartner Group, an industry analyst, the number of U.S. adults who received a phishing email almost doubled in just two years (from 57 million in 2004 to 109 million in 2006). The per-victim loss during that period spiked almost five-fold, from $257 to $1,244. Whether you're being scammed through ignorance or arrogance, the results are the same, according to McAfee.

Let me know how well you fare on the test. Share the test with your kids, your parents, your relatives, and friends—it's a logic/puzzle solving way to learn the difference between a phishing site and the real McCoy.