Phishing is the act of fooling a computer user into submitting personal information by creating a counterfeit website that looks like a real (and trusted) site. It is a hacker technique of “fishing” for passwords and other secret financial info. According to WordSpy.com, the word was invented by computer hackers in the late 1990’s, and it plays off a common hacker word play of changing the letter “f” to “ph”, which was seen as early as the seventies with “phone phreaks.”
