phishing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The practice of impersonating a trustworthy company through fake websites or emails to steal sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers.

   Like a con artist in a bank uniform coaxing out your account number.

   The company trained its staff to spot phishing before clicking suspicious links.

   A wave of phishing hit bank customers with messages mimicking official alerts.

   Note

   A computing term built on an angler's metaphor. It respells fishing, in the sense of "trying to find," and the odd spelling comes from cracker and pirate groups on Usenet who varied spellings to slip past the filters of mainstream servers. Compare phreak and phat. Technically it is one kind of social engineering, and the bait need not be email: phishing scams now arrive as fraudulent text messages too.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of getting around a security system by adopting a false identity.

   Through phishing, the attacker took on a manager's identity and unlocked restricted accounts.

   The breach started with phishing rather than any weakness in the firewall.

   Similarimpersonation, spoofing

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of phish.

   The group is phishing financial institutions across three countries at once.

   Criminals were phishing for login credentials long before the company noticed.

   Note

   The -ing form of phish is spelled exactly like the computing noun, so position tells them apart. After a form of be it is the verb (they were phishing bank customers). Before a noun it is the noun used as a modifier (a phishing scam). The base phish is itself also a noun meaning a single attack, so a phish counts what uncountable phishing names.

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