Phishing Ain't What It Used To Be: How An Old Attack Has Evolved

By Tyler Moffitt, Carbonite

Phishing attacks are proliferating on the web. Their sheer volume has helped them become one of the most common sources of data breach used today.

From the time it was first described in a paper by the International HP Users Group, Interex in 1987 to today, phishing has become one of the most well-known strategies for stealing credentials among both cybersecurity experts and the general public.

Itself a subset of social engineering, phishing has exploded in diversity in recent years, evolving from error-riddle, wide-net attempts to fool one user out of thousands to a highly sophisticated and often narrowly targeted con. The endgame remains the same: to swipe confidential information from an unsuspecting target in order to extract something of value.

We’ll dive into a few of these methods here, but for examples of these attacks and additional techniques, download the 11 Types of Phishing eBook here.