4/21/2005 8:41

Janet's post made me wonder why on earth "phishing" is spelled the way it is. This is what Wikipedia had to say about it:

"The term 'phishing' is sometimes said to stand for password harvesting fishing, though this is likely a backronym. The cracker community tends to use creative spellings as a sort of jargon, and coinages such as warez have even escaped into more mainstream usages. The term phreaking, which refers to gaining access to telephone networks, most likely influenced the spelling of the term. Still other theories accredit the term "phishing" to originate from the name "Brien Phish" who was the first to allegedly use psychological techniques to steal credit card numbers in the 1980s. Others believe that "Brien Phish" was not a real person but a fictional character used by scammers to identify each other. Another, more recent theory credits the nature of the attacks, in which one is fishing, metaphorically, for an unsuspecting user's information."

So there you have it.

Posted by at April 21, 2005 8:41 AM

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