Eleven Plus Phishing

We have been phished at one time or another. This, as you well know, is being a recipient of hundreds of randomly sent out emails. The object of phishing is to try to engage with an unwary potential customer. Once the phishing enterprise has captured your interest – and your email – then the force is directed towards you.

Web developers some years ago worked out a method of calculating how long we had spent on a site – and whether we had visited the site before.

We will all have watched an attack on an eleven plus question by the method of shooting off many different answers. “If a tennis match lasts for 3 hours and 20 minutes, and ends at 18.10, what time did the match start?”

The first round of phished questions could revolve around the make up of the mens final at Wimbledon. This could delay answering the question by some minutes. The second attack could come from the unlikely source of which rackets the men were using. We would now get into the realm of types of medication, remedies for injuries to wrists and elbows, congratulatory telegrams informing us of our winnings and ending up with requests for our bank details from unverified sources.

So many contradictory adverts and pleas for information could flood the mind.

Keep calm and focus. We can empty the contents of the deleted items with one click of the bottom. We can open a new folder to keep information. We can set up safe gateways to ensure that unseemly sites are rebuffed.

What we really have to do is set up a system that filters unwanted demands on our time. The question is not about who, where, when and what was playing tennis, it was about simple manipulation of time. In other words we have to cut out as much phishing as possible.

We simply have to remember that there are sixty minutes in an hour – then the whole problem is easy to solve.

So the next time your child wanders off course remind him or her to: `Stop phishing about and think before you answer.”