Ichthyology: Phishing as a Science

Why HN readers recommended it

HN people cite it to show even technical users fall for phishing and that hardware security keys are the real fix.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Black Hat

Topic

phishing defense

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

3

HN mentions in dataset

4

Recommendation years in dataset

2018–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Phishing is frankly an embarrassment for the mainstream security community. The temptation is to "blame the stupid users" -- but the truth is that even a script kiddie can take a real email from a mainstream brand, "Save As HTML...", change one link, and resend... …

• Maybe if you’re referring to regular phishing sure, but spear phishing is specifically designed so it won’t go to your junk email and will look like something made for them personally, there won’t be any spelling mistakes, it will have been sent from a likely …

• I watched a presentation from Stripe internal eng that was given I forget where. An internal engineer there who did a bunch of security work phished like half of her own company (testing, obviously). Her conclusion, in a really well-done talk, was that it was …