The 'fappening' attack, in which intimate photos of a number of celebrities were made public, was originally thought to be a result of insecurity on Apple's iCloud servers, but was in fact the product of a number of successful phishing attempts.

Perhaps one of the most consequential phishing attacks in history happened in 2016, when hackers managed to get Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to offer up his Gmail password.

Some phishing scams have succeeded well enough to make waves:

The 'ph' is part of a tradition of whimsical hacker spelling, and was probably influenced by the term 'phreaking,' short for 'phone phreaking,' an early form of hacking that involved playing sound tones into telephone handsets to get free phone calls. The term arose among hackers aiming to trick AOL users into giving up their login information. One of the oldest types of cyberattacks, phishing dates back to the 1990s, and it's still one of the most widespread and pernicious, with phishing messages and techniques becoming increasingly sophisticated. Phishing emails can be targeted in several different ways, with some not being targeted at all, some being 'soft targeted' at someone playing a particular role in an organization, and some being targeted at specific, high-value people.

'Phish' is pronounced just like it's spelled, which is to say like the word 'fish'-the analogy is of an angler throwing a baited hook out there (the phishing email) and hoping you bite. These attacks use social engineering techniques to trick the email recipient into believing that the message is something they want or need-a request from their bank, for instance, or a note from someone in their company-and to click a link or download an attachment. Phishing is a type of cyberattack that uses disguised email as a weapon.

Dropbox transfer email scam