Early Phishing
Early Phishing
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Koceilah Rekouche krekouche@pushstart.info

The history of phishing traces back in important ways to the mid-1990s when hacking
software facilitated the mass targeting of people in password stealing scams on America
Online (AOL). The first of these software programs was mine, called AOHell, and it was
where the word phishing was coined. The software provided an automated password
and credit card-stealing mechanism starting in January 1995. Though the practice of
tricking users in order to steal passwords or information possibly goes back to the
earliest days of computer networking, AOHell’s phishing system was the first automated
tool made publicly available for this purpose. 1 The program influenced the creation of
many other automated phishing systems that were made over a number of years. These
tools were available to amateurs who used them to engage in a countless number of
phishing attacks. By the later part of the decade, the activity moved from AOL to other
networks and eventually grew to involve professional criminals on the internet. What
began as a scheme by rebellious teenagers to steal passwords evolved into one of the
top computer security threats affecting people, corporations, and governments.

The Internet In 1996
The Internet In 1996
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internet96

In 1996, the Internet Archive began archiving the web for a service called the Wayback Machine. They’ve now archived 55 billion web pages. That’s enough web pages that if you were to print them all out using your roommate’s printer while he was at class and tape them end-to-end, you could reach the moon and back 28 trillion times.

I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.

Exploring Historical & Emerging Phishing Techniques
Exploring Historical & Emerging Phishing Techniques
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International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications (IJNSA), Vol.5, No.4, July 2013
DOI : 10.5121/ijnsa.2013.5402 23

Marc A. Rader1 and Syed (Shawon) M. Rahman2, *
1CapellaUniversity, Minneapolis, MN, USA and Associate Faculty, Cochise CollegeAZ, USA
Mrader3@CapellaUniversity.edu
Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Hawaii-Hilo, Hawaii,
USA and Part-time Faculty at Capella University, Minneapolis, USA
*SRahman@hawaii.edu
ABSTRACT
Organizations invest heavily in technical controls for their Information Assurance (IA) infrastructure.
These technical controls mitigate and reduce the risk of damage caused by outsider attacks. Most
organizations rely on training to mitigate and reduce risk of non-technical attacks such as social
engineering. Organizations lump IA training into small modules that personnel typically rush through
because the training programs lack enough depth and creativity to keep a trainee engaged. The key to
retaining knowledge is making the information memorable. This paper describes common and emerging
attack vectors and how to lower and mitigate the associated risks.
KEY WORDS
Security Risks, Phishing, Social Engineering, Cross Site Scripting, Emerging Attack Vectors, DNS poising.
1. INTRODUCTION
Phishing is a social engineering technique that is used to bypass technical controls implemented
to mitigate security risks in information systems. People are the weakest link in any security
program. Phishing capitalizes on this weakness and exploits human nature in order to gain access
to a system or to defraud a person of their assets.

Tila Tequila, Hilary Duff Hacked By “Tesla” of Kryogeniks
Tila Tequila, Hilary Duff Hacked By “Tesla” of Kryogeniks
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I couldn’t imagine a crazier way to get yourself some attention from the hacking crew you want to join than taking out one of the biggest “phenomenons” on Myspace then following it up with the Hilary Duff music page, but there you go. The page content doesn’t appear to have had anything malicious placed on it, but the individual behind the hacks couldn’t resist sending out a few bulletins.

 

tila_1

Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI
Miley Cyrus Hacker Raided by FBI
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A 19-year-old hacker who published provocative photos of teen queen Miley Cyrus earlier this year was raided by the FBI Monday morning in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The hacker, Josh Holly, repeatedly bragged online about breaking into the Disney star’s e-mail account and stealing her photos. He also gave interviews to bloggers and others and boasted that authorities would never find him because he moved so often. [Last month, Holly contacted Threat Level seeking to have an article written about him here.]

But this morning the FBI did find him and, after talking with him for more than an hour about his exploits, served him with a search warrant and a list of items to be seized (which was posted at the hacking site digitalgangster.com after Holly showed it to a friend).

mileycyrus2

 

Comcast.net Hijacker Gets 4 Months
Comcast.net Hijacker Gets 4 Months
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A former member of the hacker gang Kryogeniks was sentenced to four months in prison Monday for his role in a 2008 stunt that replaced Comcast’s homepage with a shout-out to other hackers.

James Robert Black Jr., 21,was known as “Defiant” when he and two other hackers hijacked Comcast’s domain name in May of 2008 — a prank that took down the cable giant’s homepage and webmail service for more than five hours, and allegedly cost the company over $128,000.

Visitors to Comcast.net had been redirected to a simple page reading “KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.”

“Mr. Black and his Kryogenicks crew created risks to all of these millions of e-mail customers for the simple sake of boosting their own childish egos,” Assistant United States Attorney Kathryn Warma told the court, according to a press release. “The callous disregard of the dangers posed to others, as well as the arrogance and recklessness displayed by these, and other hackers in committing such crimes should be considered by the Court as a factor that weighs in favor of a significant prison sentence.”

Secret-Spilling Sources at Risk Following Cryptome Breach
Secret-Spilling Sources at Risk Following Cryptome Breach
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Ruxpin-Vanity-Page-660x244

Secret-spilling site Cryptome was hacked over the weekend, possibly exposing the identities of whistleblowers and other confidential sources, according to a hacker who contacted Wired.com and claimed responsibility for the breach.

The hacker said two intruders from the group Kryogeniks breached the long-running site, where they gained access to a repository of secret files and correspondence. Among them, the hacker claimed, were the records of self-proclaimed WikiLeaks insiders who have been the source of several unconfirmed tips supposedly detailing internal WikiLeaks matters.

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