The History and Future of Phishing

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Receiving a spam email in your inbox is usually nothing more than a minor nuisance these days. Most of us delete them without a second thought.

The Early Days of Email

Yet spam has not always been harmless. Over time it evolved into phishing and became one of the internet’s most persistent security threats.

The story begins in 1965 with MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to access shared files from remote terminals. In 1971 the prototype network ARPANET introduced the @ symbol, enabling messages to be sent to specific users and marking the birth of email. Four years later, in 1976, Queen Elizabeth II became the first head of state to send an email.

The First Spam Messages

It took another year for the first standard email—complete with “To” and “From” fields and forwarding capabilities—to be sent. Only twelve months after that, the first mass email appeared. Sent to 397 users in 1978, it proved so unpopular that no one attempted anything similar for more than a decade.

By 1988 “spamming” had become a prank among players of multi-user dungeon (MUD) games. Rival players would flood each other’s accounts with junk mail, crashing systems and preventing gameplay. The term itself was popularized by Richard Depew, who referenced the famous Monty Python sketch.

From Annoyance to Security Threat

The second major wave of mass-marketing spam arrived in 1994, when two immigration lawyers sent an unsolicited message advertising their services. Because email had never been designed with security in mind, the practice quickly shifted from irritation to serious threat once it morphed into phishing.

In the 1990s the Warez community used randomly generated credit card numbers to create AOL accounts. With these compromised accounts they could send phishing messages to victims’ contacts at scale. AOL responded with stronger security measures, but the group adapted by impersonating AOL administrators and requesting login details from targeted users. The arms race escalated as viruses grew more sophisticated, stealing data and money from an ever-larger number of computers.

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