I hope not.
Phishing is a form of identity theft that dates back to the early 1990’s. AOL had a huge surge of business from individuals eager to join up with the millions of people already surfing the web. When hackers made the decision that they did not want to pay for their AOL services, they used fake identities and credit card information generators to fool AOL and gain access. The system worked until AOL made an attempt to charge the credit cards, then finding the fault in the accounts and shutting the accounts down. Soon hackers mobilized to not just faking their identities, they would steal those of AOL’s paying customers and then leave the victim to fit the bill. The trend of this expanded to not just AOL users, but all internet users and thus phishing was born.
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Very interesting post. I have seen a lot of phishing on Myspace and Facebook so I knew what it was, but I never knew where it all began. It seems like this was a little more severe with AOL than on Myspace where profiles are mostly just hacked for advertising.
ReplyDeleteSadly Phishing is very easy haha. I have personally done it to my friend as a prank. Considering all i had to do what set up a dummy facebook website and link it to one of my emails. So when the person submitted his or her information it was not mine. I ended up telling her as I was just testing the website. But yes phishing has ended up being a major problem with identity theft.
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