# phishing

Pronunciation: say "FISH-ing" /ˈfɪʃɪŋ/

## Noun

1. The practice of impersonating a trustworthy company through fake websites or emails to steal sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers.
   - Simple: A trick where someone pretends to be a real company to steal your passwords or bank details.
   - _The company trained its staff to spot phishing before clicking suspicious links._
   - _A wave of phishing hit bank customers with messages mimicking official alerts._
2. The act of getting around a security system by adopting a false identity.
   - Simple: Getting past a security system by pretending to be someone you are not.
   - _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._

## Verb

3. Present participle of phish. — present participle and gerund of phish
   - Simple: Present participle of phish. Use this form when the action is happening right now.
   - _The group is phishing financial institutions across three countries at once._
   - _Criminals were phishing for login credentials long before the company noticed._

## Origin

This is a respelling of "fishing" (in the sense of trying to find something). In Usenet newsgroups, cracker and pirate groups used variant spellings like "phish" and "warez" to evade the scans and filters of mainstream servers policing the ARPAnet/Internet, comparable to other respelling slang such as "phat" and "phreak."

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/phishing (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).