To those in the know, swapping an f for a ph at the start of a word is a sure indicator of digital provenance. The prototype, however, predates even the internet, drawing on an innovation from the very earliest days of electronic hacker culture: “phone phreaking.”
It’s generally thought that phone phreaking began in America in 1957, when Joe Engressia, a blind seven-year-old child with a remarkable gift for musical pitches, discovered that by whistling a particular tone into his telephone, he could cut off a phone message from an unconnected number. Young Joe had unwittingly discovered that a 2600 Hz tone had been built by the telecoms company AT&T into its system as an automatic switch, for internal company use.
Using this particular tone automatically made the telephone switching system act as though a call had been finished, leaving the line open and—as Engressia and those who came after him soon discovered—the person holding the phone in a position to make international and long-distance calls free of charge.
Joe Engressia’s talent—and the skills of his friend, John Draper—first came to public attention in a 1971 article for Esquire Magazine by Ron Rosenbaum that also seems to have coined the term phreaking itself.63
Previously to this, Engressia and his comrades had described themselves as “phone freaks,” a phrase evoking both their outsider status and their obsessive interest in the intricacies of the phone system (the term freak itself had been in use as a term for someone extremely keen on something since the first decade of the twentieth century, apparently originating in the phrase “Kodak freak” to describe a committed early camera expert).
Rosenbaum compressed the two words into one neat term—and in the process offered the world not only an iconic word, but a variant spelling that would come to be associated with wider hacker culture far beyond the fooling of telephone exchanges, thanks not least to the publication in 1985 of what would become one of the world’s most influential hacker e-magazines, Phrack. This institution continues to this day at the site phrack.org, and took its name from a combination of the words phreak and hack.
Two of the most famous of Engressia’s successors were the cofounders of Apple, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, whose exploits in the 1970s—including a legendary prank call to the Vatican, purporting to come from Henry Kissinger—were probably inspired by the original Esquire piece. Orthographically, however, perhaps the greatest legacy of phreaking lies in the distinctly more unpleasant field of “phishing”: a form of email scamming in which the scammers are effectively fishing for gullible recipients by sending out purportedly legitimate emails asking for personal and banking details.
The word phishing itself appeared around 1995, its first recorded mention being as part of the hacking tool AOHell, a program designed to help its users perform various kinds of hacking via AOL (America Online). One of these was a tool that would automatically send fake messages to other AOL users, purporting to be a “security check” from AOL itself and requesting username and password details—a crude approach, but one that proved sufficiently successful to define both the language and the techniques of countless subsequent subterfuges.