what's the meaning of the word "phish"?

[japanjapan]

Dear teachers,

Please read the following paragraph. I don't know the word "phish", since there is quotation mark, I guess the word might be coined by the writer. please help.

Virus hunters have discovered more than 100,000 viruses, many of them variations of a few large virus families like Mydoom or Sobig. The virus attacks can be simple mischief but often have criminal intent, such as launching an online attack against a hated Web site, sending spam to sell drugs or “phishing” e-mails to lure people into divulging personal information. Such attacks can range from annoying to devastating.

Thanks a lot, every time I have the trouble of English, I think of here first, every time I come here, I feel at home.

[Sstupid]

You can find the answer in the net, such as
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/p/phishing.html

[advoca]

That web page explaines it beautifully. It says:


(Phishing) (noun.) The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information. For example, 2003 saw the proliferation of a phishing scam in which users received e-mails supposedly from eBay claiming that the user’s account was about to be suspended unless he clicked on the provided link and updated the credit card information that the genuine eBay already had. Because it is relatively simple to make a Web site look like a legitimate organizations site by mimicking the HTML code, the scam counted on people being tricked into thinking they were actually being contacted by eBay and were subsequently going to eBay’s site to update their account information. By spamming large groups of people, the “phisher” counted on the e-mail being read by a percentage of people who actually had listed credit card numbers with eBay legitimately.