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Phishing is something that is frequently in the news, but what exactly does the term "Phishing" mean?

According to the Anti-Phishing Workgroup's website: The word "phishing" comes from the analogy that Internet scammers are using email lures to "fish" for passwords and financial data from the sea of Internet users. The term was coined in the 1996 timeframe by hackers who were stealing America On-Line accounts by scamming passwords from unsuspecting AOL users. The first mention on the Internet of phishing is on the alt.2600 hacker newsgroup in January 1996, however the term may have been used even earlier in the printed edition of the hacker newsletter "2600"

Over the years, the term has evolved to specifically describe email messages that are sent with counterfeited sender information to entice the recipient to give up some piece of confidential information in response to a fraudulent request. An example would be an email that appears to come from the recipient's bank requesting the recipient to visit a website and input his account and password information for the bank to verify. In this case the website used to collect the information would not actually be controlled by the bank, and if the recipient does enter his information the sender of the phishing email would then be able to use it to commit fraud.

Recent Phishing Incidents:

• February 2010: emails pretending to be from the "National Intelligence Council", mostly being sent to email addresses ending in .mil or .gov, that include a .zip attachment named "2020 Project" which actually contains the Zeus trojan. This trojan is used to collect usernames and passwords from infected computers.

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