In 2019 nearly 4.7 billion phishing emails were sent every day making these attacks on the rise by 250%. How did this epidemic begin and what can be done to prevent these attacks from increasing?
Today spam makes up over half of all emails and 92% of all malware is delivered via email. What began as an annoying nuisance of junk emails quickly turned into something dangerous. Attackers started to add malicious content to their spam turning it into phishing a term that was coined to represent emails being used to “fish†for sensitive data in the sea of internet users. Last year alone the FBI received nearly 50,000 reports of phishing and compromised emails costing a total of $1.8 billion. Knowing the origins of this can help give insight on how to prevent it in the future.
The Begining Of Spam
In 1978 Gary Thuerk sent the first spam email to 397 ARPANET users but this email was so unpopular that no one would send another like it for a decade. In 1988 players on a multi-user dungeon game began a “spamming†prank on their rivals where they would flood their accounts with junk email which in turn would crash their systems and prevent gameplay. This prank of spamming quickly became a serious security threat. Because email was not designed to be secure if was unable to combat malicious intent.
The Begining Of Phishing
In the 1990s the Warez community began using random credit card generators to gain access to AOL accounts and then use these accounts to send phishing messages to the victim’s contacts. AOL combated this with new security measures stopping the use of randomly generated credit card numbers but the Warez community created a new scam. This time posing as AOL admins requesting login credentials from other users and then sending phishing messages to their victim’s contacts. Email viruses continued to grow rampant and by 2003 the number of spam emails exceeded those of legitimate emails for the first time. Viruses such as the ILOVEYOU virus infected 45 million Windows PCs. In 2009 operation Phish Phry was used to steal $1.5 million using phished login credentials and account details targeting hundreds to thousands of account holders at U.S. Banks. 4 years later another group of hackers targeted employees at Target’s HVAC vendor with malware-laced emails gaining access to Target’s systems and stealing payment data from 110M shoppers. In the wake of this, advanced technology needed to be developed to prevent more attacks.
The Prevention Of Phishing
In 2002 anti-spam security technology was first introduced to catch evolving language commonly found in spam using early machine learning technology. By 2005 these programs started to verify senders to prevent domain spoofing. Almost a decade later with threats continuing to grow Avanan was founded to address cloud-based email security with patented inline API Technology. As 90% of businesses are already using or plan to start using cloud-hosted emails threats to cloud-security have only continued to rise with 1 in 4 users being affected by the theft of data stored on the cloud. In order for cloud collaboration to work well without threat it will require a new kind of email security – how will you protect yourself and your business?
Learn more about the history and future of phishingOpens a new window from the infographic below.