A new study conducted at the University of Plymouth underscores that spam filters in popular email providers are highly ineffective against phishing attacks. The researchers found that 75% of phishing emails without malicious links and 64% of those with links end up in the inbox of potential victims, while a mere 6% of these messages is correctly marked as malicious.
One of the researchers stated that “the poor performance of most providers implies they either do not employ filtering based on language content, or that it is inadequate to protect users.” He finds the results of the study worrying “given users’ tendency to perform poorly at identifying malicious messages.”
Read more: Assessing the efficiency of phishing filters employed by email service providers