Phishing

(redirected from Phishing site)
Also found in: Dictionary, Encyclopedia.

Phishing

The illegal practice of attempting to steal an identity by setting up a website and encouraging people to input credit card or other personal information. Phishing often purports to present a legitimate web business and asks the "customer" to give personal information in order to receive fictitious products. Alternatively, phishing may involve a criminal sending out e-mail purporting to be from a bank or credit card company asking for information as part of an "urgent" request. Phishers then steal the identity directly or sell to another party for illegal purposes.
Farlex Financial Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Phishing.

Phishing is one way that identity thieves use the Internet to retrieve your personal information, such as passwords and account numbers.

The thieves' techniques include sending hoax emails claiming to originate from legitimate businesses and establishing phony websites designed to capture your personal information.

For example, you may receive an urgent email claiming to come from your bank and directing you to a website where you're asked to update or verify your account number or password. By responding you give identity thieves an opportunity to steal your confidential information.

Phishing is difficult to detect because the fraudulent emails and websites are often indistinguishable from legitimate ones and the perpetrators change identities regularly.

Dictionary of Financial Terms. Copyright © 2008 Lightbulb Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Mentioned in ?
References in periodicals archive ?
The address of the official Libra website is 'www.calibra.com.' Calibra is the crypto-wallet for Libra, but the phishing site has changed the 'i' in Calibra into an accented 'i' that is easily missed at first glance.
Phishing site looks almost identical to Libra's official website
If any of domain matched with the current website, then declare it a legitimate or otherwise make it a phishing site.
Phishing Detection: Analysis of Visual Similarity Based Approaches
These tools have built-in features which use blacklists and/or URL/web page heuristics to detect phishing sites.
Complementing blacklists: An enhanced technique to learn detection of zero-hour phishing URLs
When features of a site are similar to the ones of a phishing site, the entry site will be identified as a phishing one.
IDENTIFYING PHISHING WEBSITES BY TECHNIQUES HYPER HEURISTIC AND MACHINE LEARNING
According to the statistics of PhishTank, over 1.3 million phishing sites are verified and registered in its database merely in the first two years after its launch.
Web phishing detection based on page spatial layout similarity
Furthermore, PhishTank has explicitly designed its blacklist to be helpful to defenders (especially ISP 'abuse teams'), adding features such as searches for phishing sites based on ASNs and RSS feeds of new entries within an ASN.
The impact of public information on phishing attack and defense
"You can buy a kit to put up a phishing site or deploy Trojans with no coding skills whatsoever."
By invitation only: insurers are challenged to protect customer information against increasingly sophisticated and creative scams while meeting customers' growing demands for online business capabilities
* PhishTank's database of fresh phishing submissions is sometimes polluted since anyone can submit a website (we even found BitDefender's website submitted as a possible phishing site).
Build your antiphishing technology in just 5 minutes
Among the other techniques used by phishers are addressing victims using their real name, sending e-mail that appears to come from a trusted friend or coworker, using a Web address for the phishing site that's very close to that of the real site, featuring images at the phishing site that were stolen from the real site, using links at the phishing site that connect to the real site, and employing scripts at the phishing site that place a picture of the real Web address over the address bar.
Beware e-mail scams seeking your financial information
When a site is determined to be a potential Phishing site, the ZILLAbar displays a Phishing Alert in real time.
ISE LAUNCHES FREE ZILLABAR 2.0 BROWSER TOOL
For example, modules in the software can notify you if you are visiting a known phishing site or if you are being redirected to a Web site that looks like the one you want to visit but is actually a fake.
Worth a look: Web browsing under wraps

Financial browser ?
Full browser ?