In the beginning there was phone phreaking and worms. Then came spam and pop ups. And none of it was good. But in the nascent decades of the internet, digital networks were detached and isolated enough that the average user could mostly avoid the nastiest stuff. By the early 2000s, though, those walls started coming down, and digital crime boomed.

Google, which will turn 20 in September, grew up during this transition. And as its search platform spawned interconnected products like ad distribution and email hosting, the company realized its users and everyone on the web faced an escalation of online scams and abuse. So in 2005, a small team within Google started a project aimed at flagging possible social engineering attacks—warning users when a webpage might be trying to trick them into doing something detrimental.

Read full news article on Wired – Threat Level