This post was originally published on this site

Phishing authors have long ago discovered that adding HTML attachments to the messages they send out can have significant benefits for them – especially since an HTML file can contain an entire credential-stealing web page and does not need to reach out to the internet for any other reason than to send the credentials a victim puts in a login form to an attacker-controlled server[1]. Since this approach can be significantly more effective than just pointing recipients to a URL somewhere on the internet, the technique of sending out entire credential-stealing pages as attachments has become quite commonplace.