Terminus [ Phishing ]

Definition 1
Phishing ist ein Kunstwort aus »Password« und »fishing«. Damit ist klar, worum es geht: das Fischen nach Kennwörtern und anderen vertraulichen Zugangsdaten. Mit Hilfe betrügerischer Mails versuchen die Absender, Ihnen persönliche Informationen wie Kreditkartennummern, Kennwörter, Kontoinformationen oder andere persönliche Daten unter Vorspiegelung falscher Tatsachen zu entlocken.
http://www.microsoft.com/germany/athome/security/email/phishing.mspx#EHC 18.10.06

Definition 1
Phishers lure unsuspecting visitors to fake Web sites that look like those of legitimate organisations. The aim is to persuade people to give their passwords and credit-card information, which the thief can then exploit. Among the firms to be targeted in this year’s wave of attacks was PayPal; authentic-looking e-mails were sent out asking people to update their details at a Web site that seemed convincing. ... phishing expeditions are now being conducted by virus attacks, in which message boxes pop up asking people for private information, which is then sent by e-mail to the attacker; often the virus also grabs the contents of the person’s address book as a source for further attacks. The term has been known in the hacker culture since about 1996, as an obvious respelling of fishing ...
http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-phi1.htm 18.10.06

Definition 2
Phishing is derived from “fishing”-a social engineering attack attempting to trick users into revealing personal information like passwords and credit card numbers. E-mails masquerading as official messages from banks are typical tools used by phishers. Phishing scams hooked unwary Internet users one by one to divulge data. But pharming threatens to reel-in entire schools of victims. Pharming (from farming) exploits the DNS-the Internet system that translates a computer name into an Internet Protocol (IP) address.
http://www.dqindia.com/content/enterprise/2005/105060702.asp (16.11.06)