Free Materials For Teachers

Image©2009 ABS No Phishing sign
How To Avoid Phishing Sites
No Phishing! Some web safety measures are straightforward, for example, avoiding inappropriate web sites. But phishing is so sneaky that it traps both old and young web users. Phishing is the practice of unscrupulous people setting up fake versions of legitimate web sites, often popular and excellent sites they know that many people will visit.

Anti-Phishing Phil
Someone decided to do something about it, developing training systems to teach web users to avoid these nasty but clever traps. The result was Anti-Phishing Phil, an interactive game to teach users how to identify phishing URLs, where to look for cues in web browsers, and how to use search engines to find legitimate sites. It was the work of members of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) at Carnegie Mellon University.

Their studies found that user education can help prevent people from falling for phishing attacks. Unlike the usual training manuals, which people find so tedious to read, learning how to avoid fake sites by playing this game was entertaining, and the tips were illustrated simply and in a way you could easily remember.

The Anti-Phishing Phil game had so much practical value that it eventually was purchased for commercial use by a security technology company. The original link to the free version on the CMU site is gone, but I’ve found a link where you can still play it. It was downloaded under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license by someone at University College London, and it’s still on their website.

Play Anti-Phishing Phil Game Free Online
While there is a more extensive commercial version, you can still play several rounds of the original Anti-Phishing Phil game online for free. Click the first link at the bottom of the page to try it out. I promise you’ll learn how to avoid most phishing sites in 10 minutes and have fun doing so!

More Information and Free Downloads
When you are finished playing Anti-Phishing Phil, click the second link on this page. It leads to Cyber Academy, another CyLab project aimed at teaching web safety to upper elementary kids through interactive online games. While some of the free software for this project only runs on old systems, I feel that there is still quite a bit of valuable classroom material in Cyber Academy to use in teaching web safety.

Application needed: Web Browser
Subject area: Life Skills, Web Safety.
Level: Teacher, Grades 5-7.


Online Links-Resources

CLICK HERE to play Anti-Phishing Phil on the University College London site.

CLICK HERE to go to the Cyber Academy Classroom Materials page to find out about the Cyber Academy game and download the Teacher’s Companion and other materials.

April 18th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
One Response to “No Phishing!”

  1. 1
    Dinell Stuckey Says:

    Now that is some really useful information. I really learned something here. Thanks for sharing that with us!
    Dinell

 

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