Phishing is an act of illegally procuring or trying to procure confidential financial information pertaining to Bank account (password) and/or Credit Card related detail of an individual or group of individuals. Phishing is usually done by creating look-alike web sites of Banks and Card issuing companies, where unsuspecting people are requested to enter or share their confidential data, through spam email requests. Historically, the origin of phishing dates back to the year 1995-1996.

Phishing is the act of criminally acquiring sensitive and confidential electronic information, usually of financial nature like bank account password information and/or credit card secret code information. Phishing scams are usually undertaken through emails or messages sent through the internet by a group of scamsters, often acting as representatives of the bank or card issuing organization. Users are caught in their trap if they respond to such emails or share and/or disclose confidential financial data.

When personal and financial information are extracted from a person over the internet luring them and faking others name it is termed as phishing. This information may be used to withdraw money or property without the consent of the actual owner. These hacking websites could be easily recognized by following certain norms.

These sites often send pop ups to the browsers and asks personal and financial information.

A kind of internet treachery is known as phishing. It lures internet users to give away personal and financial information to the hacking websites. These websites imitate the trustworthy and familiar websites of the user and generally send spam emails and pop messages o extract information. The financial information extracted could be used to withdraw money from bank account of the user in unauthorized transactions.

Even Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) using strong cryptography could not restrict these hackers to sending such messages.

In this age of completely networked environment where individuals and corporates wholly depend on their computer system, internet security and data privacy has become a major issue. One of the significant threats is the phishing syndrome which has affected millions of individuals and corporates around the world. It is a program created by hackers for seeking financial and personal information from the users. This is usually done by sending spam messages and pop ups within browsers.

Phishing websites fake original ones to extract useful personal and financial information from the users. Persons who enter this type of information over the internet are susceptible to such attacks. This kind of fraud generally relates to the banking and credit card related queries embedded in email messages and pp ups in browsers. The link takes this information to the hacking site instead of the original one it is faking.