A closer look
Teenage hackers in the mid-nineties invented 'phishing' by impersonating America Online customer service representatives to trick gullible users into giving up their account passwords. They created automated chat scripts that would send instant messages to random people claiming there was a billing issue, effectively giving birth to the modern scam economy. Instead of hacking sophisticated mainframes, these teenagers realized it was infinitely easier to just politely ask people to hand over their sensitive information, exploiting human psychology rather than software vulnerabilities. The spelling of 'phishing' with a 'ph' was a nod to the original 'phreakers' who used audio tones to hack telephone networks in the seventies. Fast forward a few decades, and this exact same primitive strategy is still successfully compromising multi-billion dollar corporations because employees simply cannot resist clicking on urgent emails from fake IT departments
