See also “10 top anti-phishing tools and services” to read about technologies that can aid you in hardening your phishing defenses.

The history of phishing

Hackers may have adopted the term phishing because it sounds like fishing, a play on their goal of trawling for unsuspecting victims. 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.

Some tech historians believe the term phishing dates to the 1990s when hackers used the characters — <>< — (resembling a fish) to disguise conversations about fraudulent activity in AOL chat logs.Others trace the word phishing back to 1996 when it was first mentioned by a hacker news group.

Some of the first phishing took place in the early 1990s when hackers used fake screen names to pose as AOL administrators and steal sensitive information via AOL Instant Messenger. Phishing really blew up in 2000, when an email with the subject line “ILOVEYOU” duped millions of people into clicking on an attachment loaded with a virulent computer worm.