Phishing for Identity Theft VictimsPhishing is a form of identity theft. But what is it? And why the silly name? is the act of tricking someone into giving them confidential information or tricking them into doing something that they normally wouldn’t do or shouldn’t do. For example: sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. That handy definition comes from the michigan.gov website and offers a very good description of the term. As for the silly name... Comes from the analogy that internet scammers are using email bait to fish for passwords and financial data from the sea of internet users. Since hackers have a tendancy of replacing "f" with "ph", the term phishing was derived. The term has evolved over the years to include not only obtaining user account details but access to all personal and financial data. Another handy definition. A trend appears before our eyes. Phishing is all about conning normal people into giving their login and password details to criminals voluntarily by deception. The following pages will look at the how of phishing identity theft. The why is obvious.
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