Can someone please edit this for me and add any little details that it be missing?

A phishing attack is a method of tricking users into unknowingly providing attackers with their personal and financial information or sending money. Phishing attacks are aimed towards vulnerabilities and vulnerable people who dont know much about these attacks and how much it can affect them. One of the most common phishing attacks are sent by electronic messaging with a link appearing to be real site, but its actually a fake website managed by the attacker wanting to steal personal information. In this paper, I will be covering the evolutions of Phishing Scams and what we can expect in the future thats becoming such a crisis for victims and businesses.

Phishing is one of the top cyber-crimes that impact our lives and business everyday all over the world. Phishing is the most common scam on the internet and nothing is being done to stop it. Phishing is an attempt to lure a user into surrendering their username, password, or other personal and sensitive information, by pretending to be an official request from a legitimate business, most often a large financial institution. Since social media is on the rise, peoples personal information is all over the internet, and we have no idea if a website is truly what it seems to be. As the days go by, Phishing scams are become more and more of an important topic because not only can hackers attack others, but so can anyone with internet access. When a phishing attack is played the right way, it can have terrible consequences for the victims, they are at risk of losing the money they saved their entire life and their personal information can get stolen, their identity can be stolen.

The phrase phishing was first used in 1996 and ever since it has continued to grow and evolve since then. When Phishing first began in the early 1990s, hackers began hacking AOL accounts since AOL accounts were so popular and it was easy to trick the users. In the early 1990s AOL would create an account whenever a valid looking credit card number was entered. In the middle of the decade AOL began to verify the credit card information entered so hackers began to steal existing AOL accounts by posing as AOL employees and tricking the victim into revealing their username and password information. (Jakobsson & Myers, 2006)

Who knew in the early stages of phishing that it would become so popular today and so easy to trick people into giving a hacker their personal information. As phishers became more and more an expert, they learned from their mistakes and they began to create more sophisticated, professional looking emails, emulating the look and feel of the targeted institutions. As phishers were more successful tricking a lot of people, they began to invest money on creating a fake pop-up login window that appeared in front of the legitimate website window when victims clicked a link in the phishing email. Little did the victims know they were being tricked into entering their usernames and passwords, the hackers were not able to gain access to their accounts on the real website. (Miller. P, 2008)

The history of Phishing:

This first time the word phishing was ever printed on media was on an article written by Ed Stansel, who was writing for the Florida Times Union. The article was published on March 16^th, 1997. The article advised the readers: not to get caught by online phishers angling for account information (McFredies, P, 2003) Phishing is pronounced the same way fishing is pronounced, the letter was changed because hackers have their own language that they use called Haxor. Haxor replaces standard English character with other ASCII characters. An example of a sentence using Haxor is:

English: Fishing can be fun if you have the right bait

Haxor: Phi5HiNg c@n 83 fun iF y0u H@V3 tHe RIgH7 8aI7

In 2003, most phishing scams were sent to victims by e-mails. The e-mails were full of spelling errors and poor grammar, instantly victims knew the e-mail was a scam because of the spelling and the poor grammar. Hackers are always going to be hackers, and they are brilliant since they werent succeeding much at scamming any victims, they were smart enough and began to build upon their writing skills and design skills - creating messages that are more difficult to discern as forgeries. Phishers also even began to create lookalike domain names with many favorite sites such as eBay, Yahoo, Microsoft and many more well-known companies. I believe it's critical to look at the address bar and make sure that the address on the bar starts with HTTP, followed by www and then the web page. An example of the fake web pages phishers created were: Microsoft.checkinfo.com, ebay-fulfillment.com and many other counterfeit websites hackers designed with one purpose.

The most popular scam

The Nigerian scam is one of the most popular cybercrimes out that falls under the Phishing Scams. The Nigerian scams involve a person who is overseas that is offering the victim a share in a large sum of money or payment on the condition you help them to transfer money out of their country. Even though the scams first came from Nigeria, they come from all over the world now. The Nigerian scam is known as the Nigerian 419 scam and the scammer contacts you by either email, letter, text message or through social media. The scammer sends the victim an elaborate story about a significant amount of money trapped in their bank or an inheritance that cannot be accessed. These scams can be very dangerous, and I recommend anyone who ever receives these types of scam emails to delete them immediately.