Think you can spot a hacker's phishing email? Take Google's quiz and find out
Before getting started, you'll be asked for a name and email to use for the quiz. Don't worry — they can be fake or decoy inputs, since they're only used to create the email templates for the quiz.
The quiz has eight questions, each with a different email setup based on real-life phishing emails. It's up to you to decide whether each email is a phishing attempt or a legitimate message.
It's possible to determine the legitimacy of each email by digging around its contents a bit first. Hovering over any link in the email will bring up the button's URL, which you can use to determine if the email's the real deal.
The email in the quiz isn't real, so clicking on a link in the body won't bring you anywhere. But remember that doing so on a real phishing email would give hackers access to your information.
You can also open up the header in the sample email to explore more details about the message and its sender. In doing so, you can see more clearly if the sender is someone you know, and if the sender's email is one you recognize.
After you make your guess about each email's legitimacy, the quiz will walk you through the steps you can take to check out an email's details, and better determine whether it's a scam or not.
But that's only the first email sample of the eight in Google's quiz. The second question tests your aptitude for spotting lookalike URLs that could trick you into clicking.
This one makes you pay special attention to the identity of the sender, and encourages you to double-check the bogus-looking Google Drive link.
This email mirrors messages people may get from online storage sites, like Dropbox.
This template tests your trust of suspicious-looking PDFs, which can often include malware or viruses. Google suggests opening files first in an online service, like Google Drive, to ensure you don't download a virus directly to your computer.
Google says this email looks almost identical to a phishing attack used to successfully hack politicians’ emails.
An email similar to this was used to target think tanks and politicians. This email shows that suspicious links can be hidden within real-looking URLs.
This email sample reminds you to be cautious with which developers you grant account access to. Emails like this from Google are common, but it's important to make sure you check the domain details to ensure it's actually from Google.
No matter how well you do on the quiz, you can use the phishing examples to look out for sketchy-looking messages in the future.
You can take the quiz for yourself to see if you can spot when you're being phished.
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