There’s a new game in town to help you fight the wave of COVID-19 related phishing attacks – “Can I Be Phished?”

Click Armor’s new online phishing awareness game is now free to everyone at http://canibephished.com, to test your proficiency at spotting potentially unsafe email messages in under 5 minutes.

 Welcome to Wonderland

The entire COVID-19 era is teaching us a lot of lessons about cybersecurity that may never have become an issue for most of us for a long time. There has been, and will continue to be, a tidal wave of emails and potential news stories coming from virtually every organization on the planet now, explaining what they are doing to address physical and virtual risks related to the pandemic. It’s overwhelming to most of us.

In the past, I’ve compared the pre-coronavirus era as a “cyber winter” or “the wild west”, in that the threats were already at an almost unmanagable level, and there wasn’t a lot of help out there to combat the growing presence of targeted phishing and social engineering scams.

It’s beginning to look a lot more like “Alice in Wonderland” now, as you need to get reliable news, but there will be a ton of unreliable information that will likely confuse you, if it hasn’t already. So, you are going to get targeted at some point, and you need to have some confidence in making decisions about what to click on, and what not to.

 No shortage of information… but what to believe?

You can find dozens of security related websites that are tracking scams and stories, as well as many informative stories like this one from WIRED and this one from ZDNet. But it can still seem overwhelming to know where to begin.

How can we begin to protect our home and workplace from being impacted by a cyberattack? The sad truth is that there is no technology that is going to be able to reliably filter out all of the potentially dangerous phishing messages and scams, without being overly cautious and hitting our productivity. Eventually, it will come down to you making a good decision about what to click on.

It’s about building confidence in your risk decisions

In the American mid-west during the colonization of the continent, there were a lot of unknown risks, and very few aids to managing those risks easily. So, people had to learn quickly how to spot and avoid risky situations. That’s really where we need to start.

Introducing “Can I Be Phished?”

“Can I Be Phished?” is Click Armor’s way of helping you learn to protect yourself, through gamification. It happens to be a great time for many of us to step back and figure out how to analyze a potentially dangerous email message, and it might not be a bad idea to do it in a way that grabs our attention and gets us to focus on real scenarios that you are likely to see in your personal or business communications. So, we’ve created the first version to be specific to many of the kinds of messages that attackers might use to exploit the current pandemic.

Example of “Can I Be Phished?” scenarios

This is a free online game that anyone can use to test their basic level of proficiency at spotting safe or suspicious email messages. It all starts with being able to recognize the clues you can find in email messages, to determine if they are likely to be SAFE or SUSPICIOUS.

Please give “Can I Be Phished? – Coronavirus Edition” a try at: http://canibephished.com

This is big news for us, so we’ve created a news release about the “Can I Be Phished? – Coronavirus Edition” gamified phishing awareness challenge, which you can read here.