Phishing is a hacking method wherein the hacker fraudulently tries to grab sensitive information like user name, password, credit card information etc. How does it work? Let’s take one example. You receive a mail from your bank that says that the bank is doing maintenance and that your personal information has to be validated again. Clicking on it you will be directed to a site where the text fields for entering user name and password is displayed and then a form to fill up the details. The screen look and feel will be exactly similar to your online bank application. If you were not careful to identify that it is a trap you will end up giving your personal information and user name and password to a false application set by the hacker. What else does a hacker need?

What happened actually? The hacker gets your mail id through name database and various other sources. He creates an HTML email that has one image that contains all the text (the text that says that the bank is doing maintenance and so on) with the bank logo and some authority name and digital signature. The whole image is a link and wherever you click it will open up a browser page taking you to an application hosted by the hacker. If you watch the URL that’s opened in the browser the domain will be very similar to the bank’s domain name with a letter or two added or interchanged. It’s easy to fall prey to it as it is hard to notice the difference. Once the application receives the input it stores the information and the hacker will merrily use them to loot your money. There are other means of phishing too and you can read more about Phishing on Wikipedia.