No less than 54 percent of the UK women and 74 percent of the men know what a phishing email is, a recently conducted research revealed. According to PayPal, the company that made the study, only 42 percent of the subject would be able to explain what a phishing attempt is to someone else. 71 percent of the people who received phishing emails deleted the messages, 25 percent forwarded it to the original bank while 5 percent of them contacted an antiphishing organization that fights to stop this kind of threat.

"Phishing emails are designed to target vulnerable people who perhaps do not know very much about using the internet. Phishers are using increasingly sophisticated ways to design phishing emails to lure people into thinking they have come from a trusted provider, such as their bank or credit card provider. The good news is that just 2% of people in the UK have fallen for these scams," Michael Barrett, Chief Information Security Officer from PayPal said.

As you probably know, the phishing attacks are more and more popular as the attackers from every corner of the world are trying to make easy money by tricking other Internet users.

Basically, a phishing attack is conducted through a fake website, usually very similar with the page owned by a bank or a financial organization that tries to lure users to disclose their private details. The attacker sends email messages to potential victims requiring them to visit the malicious page and to send them their sensitive information.

At this time, there is no 100 percent efficient application to block all these malicious pages but numerous companies are trying to block the phishing pages from reaching their goal. Take for example Google and StopBadware, two companies that are flagging pages as malware and are informing users about the presence on an online threat.