Phishing, Smishing and Vishing -- Oh My! Don’t Leave Your Employees in the Dark

Phishing. Smishing. And vishing. Three ways hackers are targeting employees in an effort to infiltrate companies and gain access to sensitive information.

‘Some of these fraud schemes have been going on since the early 1970s,’ explained John (Jack) Bennett, managing director of cyber risk at risk consultancy Kroll.

‘The term ‘phishing’ finds its roots from a guy by the name of Captain Crunch, who was a hacker back in the ’70s.’

And no, Bennett is not referring to the loveable breakfast cereal Cap’n; Captain Crunch was an American computer programmer and phone phreak.

When modems used to connect to the internet, they used a systems of tones (what we’d refer to as a dial-up connection) to communicate. Phone phreaks would use the modem to ‘listen in’ on machine-to-machine communication, using it to infiltrate systems. This ‘phreaking’ became the genesis of the word ‘phishing.’