Phishing and it's evolution...

Last class, we learned about phishing. After being able to present our phishing topic, I went down a rabbit hole and found a lot more valuable information that I wanted to reflect on. As we know, phishing is a cyberattack where someone pretends to be a trustworthy person or entity to trick you into giving them something valuable like password, money, personal data, etc. Phishing is a form of social engineering which means that the attacker targets the person rather than simply trying to hack the technology. There are many different types of phishing - each targeting something different. I think the last bit of information we shared on phishing and how you can be aware of it is the most important. STOP, THINK, VERIFY. These are three crucial steps to not be a threat to a phishing scam. 

So what is new in phishing? We briefly touched on this, but AI-generated phishing is allowing attackers to use AI to quickly create personalized messages without making spelling mistakes or awkward wording. QR-code phishing, which we touched on, but I wanted to highlight this data I found. Microsoft found that the quishing volume rose to 146% from January to March of 2026. This alone shows how big of a threat this is, and how everyone is a target. The next big thing with phishing is fake CAPTCHAs, this is when websites want you to verify that you are human. This seems super legitimate but it can also help attackers gain more access to you computer. Device-code phishing is when an attacker may send you a legitimate-looking authentication code and direct you to a real log in page. This is super dangerous because using the code the attacker gave you gives them access to your session. 

Overall, learning about phishing has made me realize that the biggest threat is not the technology itself but its how easily people can use technology to manipulate people. As AI continues to advance, phishing scams are not only more realistic, personalized but they are so much harder to recognize. So my biggest takeaway from this topic is that we need to be aware and we cannot trust everything we see online. We have to stop, think and verify because everything and anything can be a phishing scam. 


Comments

  1. williams.dan7615 September 2026 at 06:30

    Great blog post, thanks, and great presentation last week. Phishing has become gigantic global criminal endeavor, and it's still growing. I appreciate your research. It's scary how sophisticated and devious phishing scams have become. Stop, think, verify are excellent steps in stopping these scams.

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