Wombat Security Technologies has added a female fish to its anti-phishing pool.
Anti-Phishing Phyllis is the latest training program to teach employees and individuals how to spot fraudulent emails, a staggering source of fraud that costs companies millions of dollars each year. Think you've received an invitation to an engagement party? Guess again. Clicking the link could open you or your company up to a nasty worm, scam or worse.
Try it!Phyllis builds on the success of Wombat's Anti-Phishing Phil software, the animated fish that teaches how to spot fraudulent URLs in a fun, interactive way. With Internet attacks on the rise, the Carnegie Mellon spinout is successfully helping customers across several industries, around the world, to fend off Internet predators. Wombat's approach, going straight to the human source, has garnered it praise in Scientific American.
In April, Wombat unleashed
PhishGuru, training for users who think they're alert to the dangers of the Internet, but perhaps aren't as smart as they think. PhishGuru only offers the training after you've fallen for a scam, explains Dr. Jason Hong, co-founder and CTO.
"The first line of defense should be a human approach, and that's what is lacking right now," says Hong. "Conventional wisdom says you can't motivate people to take the training. We're making it fun, relative and interactive. We've demonstrated through lots of studies that this can be very effective."
Wombat currently employs eight. The software is available in Canada, Japan and Europe and translations of Phil and Phyllis in Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian and French are coming soon.
Sign up to receive Pop City every week.
Writer:
Deb SmitSource: Dr. Jason Hong, Wombat Securities