The APWG Public Education Initiative (PEI) identifies and organizes the most broadly useful counter-ecrime educational programs and forges the essential logistics to deliver them to the largest victimized cohort possible, in every language in which phishing, directed at consumer and enterprise desktops and communications devices, has become a problem.

Phishing and crimes that leverage it exploit a small number of transactional exposures, the most obvious being the capture (and criminal abuse) of online user credentials. PEI seeks to provide focused and most exposure-relevant instruction wherever and whenever possible to help consumers and enterprise users protect themselves and minimize the number of vulnerabilities that electronic crime gangs can count on being able to abuse.

In its inaugural program, the APWG and Carnegie Mellon CyLab's Supporting Trust Decisions Project launched the Phishing Education Landing Page Program in August, 2008. That program redirect consumers and enterprise users who've clicked on links in phishing campaigns to instructional materials that explains that they have just fallen for a phishing communication (email or otherwise) and advises them on how they help themselves avoid being victimized in the future.

The APWG/NCSA Counter Muling Project brings together consumer advocates, technologists, behaviorists, financial institutions, ecommerce companies and law enforcement agencies to develop consumer education programming that can be broadly (i.e. across different industries, nationalities and languages) deployed to stymie muling's growth by preventing consumers from being duped into acting as unwitting cyber accomplices and muling money for organized ecrime gangs.

For more information on these and other projects underway at the APWG's Public Education Initiative, please visit the Phishing Education Landing Page Program portal page here:

Phishing Education Landing Page Program

APWG is working on additional educational programs at this time. If you have some suggestion to offer, please contact

APWG