phishing

UK/ˈfɪʃɪŋ/US/ˈfɪʃɪŋ/

nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Phishing is tricking somebody into giving their details away. A phishing email.

It works on urgency rather than cleverness, since a message that frightens people gets answered. Phishing spelt with a ph came from an older hacker habit of respelling words that way.

Definitions of phishing

1nounphishingTricking somebody into giving their details away.B2
“One phishing email cost the charity eleven thousand pounds.”

phishing is a fraud.

Where it comes from

A respelling of fishing, following an older convention among hackers of replacing f with ph.

Built from

fishing · English — trying to find

Respelling of fishing (“trying to find”). In Usenet newsgroups, cracker and pirate groups used variant spellings of phish and warez (i.e. wares) to evade scans and filters by mainstream servers policing the ARPAnet/Internet. Compare other respelling slang like phat and phreak.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Shopping & Money

Practise this word

phishing in the wild

The term "phishing" was first recorded in 1995 in the cracking toolkit AOHell, but may have been used earlier in the hacker magazine 2600.
Phishing
Measures to prevent or reduce the impact of phishing attacks include legislation, user education, public awareness, and technical security measures.
Phishing
As Freenom offered free registration, the.tk ending was often associated with malicious activities like phishing, spam and cybersquatting.
.tk
The Internet is an inherently insecure channel for information exchange, with risk of intrusion and Internet fraud, including phishing, viruses, trojans, ransomware and worms.
Internet security
Most popular web browsers comes with built-in anti-phishing and anti-malware protection services, but almost none of the alternate web browsers have such protections.
Anti-phishing software

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

← Vocabulary