The evolution of phishing email messages.

April 12th is the anniversary of the first large scale commercial spam – the infamous “Green Card Lawyers” message that was posted to every newsgroup on Usenet News (right). Though there were attempts at spamming starting as early as 1978, Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to steal information by social engineering: the act of criminal deception. A phishing technique was described in detail in a paper and presentation delivered to the 1987 International HP Users Group, Interex.

The earliest phishing cases beginning, as fake emails were pretty easy to detect. Starting in the ‘90s, phishing attackers targeted the AOL users but today, threat Protection services, provide dynamic, robust protection against email threats. The service traces its history to an online service known as PlayNET, which hosted multi-player games for the Commodore 64. PlayNET licensed their software to a new service, Quantum Link (Q-Link), who went online in November 1985. PlayNET shut down shortly thereafter. The initial Q-Link service was similar to the original PlayNET, but over time Q-Link added many new services. When a new IBM PC client was released, the company focused on the non-gaming services and launched it under the name America Online. AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the mid-1990s, and the most recognized brand on the web in the United States. It originally provided a dial-up service to millions of Americans, as well as providing a web portal, e-mail, instant messaging and later a web browser following its purchase of Netscape. Phishers have been quietly retaliating, evolving their techniques to try and evade these protections.

In 2019, we saw phishing attacks reach new levels of creativity and sophistication. Notably, these techniques involve the abuse of legitimate cloud services like those offered by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others. The evolution of phishing attacks: why are they still effective? Phishing is an attempt to deceive the victim to gain access to confidential and private information and/or distribute infected files. In 1994–1995 AOL (America Online) was having a good time. They were one of the largest internet access providers and enjoyed a steadily growing user base. However, online security was more of a governmental thing and private businesses seldom invested in cybersecurity. A mistake that AOL learned the hard way by becoming the first victim of a phishing attack. Sometime around 1994, a hacker called “Da Chronic” developed a windows application and named it “AOHell.” Among other features, it had the first-ever phishing toolkit “CC/PW Fisher” that exploited AOL’s direct messaging system.

first large scale commercial spam