The only phishing I can see that would be extremely hard to detect are browser extension injections (either in extension window or page replacement) so the domain is legitimate.
Was it ever not popular? Looking at my spam box, I receive countless of phishing attempts per week, and doing some quick queries of the total count over time, it seems to more or less been the same for the last 2-3 years at the very least.
I'm not sure why it's such big news all of a sudden, probably because it recently succeeded against a developer of some popular npm packages?
I think most people either have the phishing emails flagged, so they never see them. The ones that get seen, get ignored as obvious phishing. And for the ones that click the link, their password manager would stop them from entering their detail. And then you have the final 0.0001% who never protected themselves, and were tired/stressed at that very moment, and fell for it.
So I guess ultimately it's bound to become news every now and then, until everyone finally got the memo to get a proper password manager that don't show accounts that don't belong to the domain.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-countering-misuse-a...
For example, yesterday at work I got an onboarding email from Lattice (lattice.com) with a link to latticehq.com, which triggered my phishing instincts before I remembered that was their old domain.
It feels like it has become significantly more prevalent in the last couple years (tracking the rise of "business email compromise" being a term-of-art).
It really shouldn't though, and something you need to be personally responsible for. If it's still possible in 2025 for you to fall for phishing attempts, you're missing something, something that starts with a p and ends with a assword manager.
You must be joking, are you still not using a password manager at all?
When you create the username+password combo you either do it yourself, then put in the password manager the domain, or you use whatever the password manager infers at the registration page, then that's basically it, for most sites. Then 1% of the websites insist to use signin.example.com for login and signup.example.com for signup, so you add both domains to your password manager, or example.com.
Now whenever you login, you either see a list of accounts (means you're on the right domain) or you don't (which means the domain isn't correct). And before people whine about "autofill doesn't always work", it doesn't matter, the list should (also) show up from the extension modal/popup, so even if autofill doesn't work for that website, you'd be protected, since the list of accounts are empty for wrong domains.
It's really easy, and migrating to a password manager just sucks the first couple of days, every day after that you'd be happy you finally did it.
I seem to recall that the typos and grammar errors were intentional. This gets rid of skeptical people, and you're left with those who are extremely gullible and likely to fall for it.
You can further appeal to developers’ geeky hearts by not making language mistakes and actually using verbiage present in real emails as sent by them.
You can exploit recent supply chain attacks and the sense of urgency and panic that developer blogs have created by pressing for even more urgency.
Seems like this does work. Don’t worry, when they actually target you, you’ll be caught.
When they target me, which happens, it doesn't work because of WebAuthn.
Buy a Security Key. If you think you might lose it, buy at least two more. For critical sites like GitHub (which was targeted here) set up your Security Keys and get into the habit of relying on them. It's the same philosophy as Rust itself, machines are really good at diligently performing a simple task, so don't leave those tasks to human vigilance, that is a foolish misallocation of resources.
Something similar to this was in the recent npmjs thing.
What would it even mean to "log in" if they reject my authenticator ? Logging in is what it's for.
But also you presented no evidence they can somehow detect their problem and try to ask for the password even if it would help them.
To make up for that, they cast a wide net. It's a numbers game, like the guys that ask every single woman they meet for their phone number. It costs nothing or next to it, and all you need is one for a payoff.