Oh my word Fishing, Phishing

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.” –Henry David Thoreau The commonality in fishing (in water for the fish as a pastime) and phishing (on online to dupe someone else) is that both need a bait: fishing needs a bait such as an insect, and in phishing the bait is to make the user believe that he or she has won a lottery or money is waiting for collection to reveal personal information, or to make money out of the target.

Fishing and phishing are homophones (they sound same but have different spellings). Fish: what a beautiful creature! The plural of fish is fish, or fishes, but ‘collective plural’ fish is common in usage. Fish is a source of protein for non-vegetarians, and there are escatarians. Pescatarian or pescetarian is a person who eats fish but may not eat other meat products like red meat (beef, pork, lamb).

Bengali Brahmins are pescatarians. Fishing is the activity of person to catch fish for a livelihood (fisherman) or to catch fish as sport. As a sport, fishing is also called angling. Fishmonger is the one who sells fish, and could also be a rumourmonger because the former may interact with many customers.

With the birth of Internet, and its dissemination, many new words (neologisms) have come into existence like phishing. Phishing is an online fraud practiced by online hackers, smugglers, criminals (phishers) to get sensitive information from their online users. It is a fraudulent activity involving sending emails to known and unknown users, or unsuspecting victims, in the guise of representing renowned and credible companies to make the users to reveal personal information like passwords, credit card numbers, personal details, or details of bank accounts in order to get money or other information which is misutilised, or blackmailed, or used to extract money.

Phishing means convincing the online user usually via email to divulge information as a result the criminal can rob your personal information or install malware. The victim of phishing may believe because the phisher impersonates as a banker, or as a well wisher. India police are also dealing with complaints of victims of phishing.

The victims often get lured to the ‘subject lines’ of spoofing emails (Double the money in ten days. Collect your money. Money to your account. Your money is here…) and share their information, or transfer some money to the other person’s account to get more money! The target users of phishing activists are the gullible online users.

Kovuuri G Reddy