How Phishing Websites Trick Users and How to Detect Them

An in-depth look at the mechanics of deceit and the algorithms counteracting it. It was 11:47 PM, and Sarah, a top engineer at a fintech startup, opted to follow a link in what appeared to be a normal Slack notification. The message implied that her token in GitHub had lapsed and that she had to reauthorize. The loaded page resembled the GitHub login screen to the letter; the font was the same, the structure was the same, and the green button was the same. She typed in her details and slept. In the morning, private stores of her company were cloned, their AWS secrets were stolen, and three production databases were secretly leaking all the data onto an Eastern European server. The page wasn't on GitHub. It was almost a verbatim copy, erected in less than two hours with a phishing kit that was free to download, uploaded to a hacked WordPress blog, and sent via a weaponized Slack webhook. This is how phishing today works, and to know why it is effective, one has to dissect not only the p