Creating a replica of an existing Web page to fool a user into submitting personal, financial, or password data.
Phishing is the term coined by hackers who imitate legitimate companies in e-mails to entice people to share passwords or credit-card numbers. Recent victims include Charlotte's Bank of America, Best Buy and eBay, where people were directed to Web pages that looked nearly identical to the companies' sites. The term had its coming out this week when the FBI called phishing the "hottest, and most troubling, new scam on the Internet."It used to be that you could make a fake account on AOL so long as you had a credit card generator. However, AOL became smart. Now they verify every card with a bank after it is typed in.


The term phishing comes from the fact that Internet scammers are using increasingly sophisticated lures as they "fish" for users' financial information and password data.
Hackers have an endearing tendency to change the letter "f" to "ph," and phishing is but one example. The f-to-ph transformation is not new among hackers, either. It first appeared in the late 1960s among telephone system hackers, who called themselves phone phreaks.