Contents

English

Etymology

Respelling of fishing (“‘trying to find’”). In the UseNet News Groups (alt.net…), 2600 cracker and pirate groups used variant spellings of phish and warez to be evade scans and filters by mainstream servers policing the ARPAnet/internet.

Pronunciation

Homophones: fishing

Noun

Singular phishing

Plural uncountable

phishing (uncountable)

Wikipedia has an article on: Phishing
  1. (computing) The act of sending email that falsely claims to be from a legitimate organization. This is usually combined with a threat or request for information: for example, that an account will close, a balance is due, or information is missing from an account. The email will ask the recipient to supply confidential information, such as bank account details, PINs or passwords; these details are then used by the owners of the website to conduct fraud.
  2. The act of circumventing security with an alias.

Synonyms

Related terms

Verb

phishing

  1. Present participle of phish.

See also

 

The above information uses material from Wiktionary and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Some facts may not have been fully verified for accuracy. [Disclaimers]
This page was last archived by our server on Fri Jul 30 00:24:49 2010. [ refresh local cache ]
Displaying this page or its contents does not use any Wikimedia Foundation's resources.
The owners of this site proudly support the Wikimedia Foundation.