Phishing is a method of trying to gather personal information using deceptive e-mails and websites.
Phishing definition
Phishing is a cyber attack that uses disguised email as a weapon. The goal is to trick the email recipient into believing that the message is something they want or need — a request from their bank, for instance, or a note from someone in their company — and to click a link or download an attachment.
What really distinguishes phishing is the form the message takes: the attackers masquerade as a trusted entity of some kind, often a real or plausibly real person, or a company the victim might do business with. It's one of the oldest types of cyberattacks, dating back to the 1990s, and it's still one of the most widespread and pernicious, with phishing messages and techniques becoming increasingly sophisticated.
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"Phish" is pronounced just like it's spelled, which is to say like the word "fish" — the analogy is of an angler throwing a baited hook out there (the phishing email) and hoping you bite. The term arose in the mid-1990s among hackers aiming to trick AOL users into giving up their login information. The "ph" is part of a tradition of whimsical hacker spelling, and was probably influenced by the term "phreaking," short for "phone phreaking," an early form of hacking that involved playing sound tones into telephone handsets to get free phone calls.
Nearly a third of all breaches in the past year involved phishing, according to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. For cyber-espionage attacks, that number jumps to 78%. The worst phishing news for 2019 is that its perpetrators are getting much, much better at it thanks to well-produced, off-the-shelf tools and templates.
Some phishing scams have succeeded well enough to make waves:
- Perhaps one of the most consequential phishing attacks in history happened in 2016, when hackers managed to get Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to offer up his Gmail password.
- The "fappening" attack, in which intimate photos of a number of celebrities were made public, was originally thought to be a result of insecurity on Apple's iCloud servers, but was in fact the product of a number of successful phishing attempts.
- In 2016, employees at the University of Kansas responded to a phishing email and handed over access to their paycheck deposit information, resulting in them losing pay.
What is a phishing kit?
The availability of phishing kits makes it easy for cyber criminals, even those with minimal technical skills, to launch phishing campaigns. A phishing kit bundles phishing website resources and tools that need only be installed on a server. Once installed, all the attacker needs to do is send out emails to potential victims. Phishing kits as well as mailing lists are available on the dark web. A couple of sites, Phishtank and OpenPhish, keep crowd-sourced lists of known phishing kits.
Some phishing kits allow attackers to spoof trusted brands, increasing the chances of someone clicking on a fraudulent link. Akamai's research provided in its Phishing--Baiting the Hook report found 62 kit variants for Microsoft, 14 for PayPal, seven for DHL, and 11 for Dropbox.
