Phishing has a few basic conceptual problems which no one seems to want to address:
- You don't need to really be "fooled" by phishing. Not in the real sense. You just need to be tired one morning and click without looking. Even if you know how to check for phishing, you might need to click on content from 10s to 100s of emails per day. Scale this out to 1 year, and even the most educated among us can fail due to an honest mistake which we otherwise could have prevented.
- Part of the problem is just that a normal workflow is: receive email --> click on URL --> enter credentials into 3rd party website. ie, this is intentional and valid behavior for most white collar workers on a daily basis. This behavioral pattern is why phishing works, and in reality, email should not be a vector for this path. Until companies and technologies stop assuming this makes sense, phishing will continue to be successful.