Phishing Isn't Fishing

One of the biggest dangers to cyber safety is Internet users who voluntarily and unwittingly give away personal information. Specifically, there is a community of Internet pirates who elicit Internet users into divulging personal information, which is in turn used to commit some form of cyber crime against the users. These pirates, who are also known as 'phishers,' purposefully and fraudulently misrepresent themselves as some legitimate entity when in fact they are not. Under the umbrella of the purportedly legitimate entity, the phishers induce the users into opening a gateway for extracting information from the users, which the phisers utilize for fraudulent purposes. While phishers are not new to the Internet, what is new is the phishers' extensive ability to permeate the personal lives of Internet users.