Phishing: a general term for criminals’ creation and use of e-mails and websites – designed to look like e-mails and websites of well known legitimate businesses, financial institutions, and government agencies – in order to deceive Internet users into disclosing their bank and financial account information or other personal data such as usernames and passwords. The “phishers” then take that information and use it for criminal purposes, such as identity theft and fraud.

        People who receive phishing e-mails also may not realize that the senders may have used “spamming” (mass e-mailing) techniques to send the e-mail to thousands and thousands of people. This means that many of the people who receive that spammed e-mail do not have accounts or customer relationships with the legitimate business or financial services company that the e-mails purport to come from. The people who create phishing e-mails count on the fact that some recipients of those e-mails will have an account or customer relationship with that legitimate business or company, and may be more likely to believe that the e-mail has come from a trusted source.

 

Spamming: Is often viewed as the act of sending unsolicited email. This multiple or vast emailing is often compared to mass junk mailings.

It is now also known as using any search engine ranking technique which causes a degradation in the quality of the results produced by the search engines. Examples of spamming include excessive repetition of a keyword in a page, optimizing a page for a keyword which is unrelated to the contents of the site, using invisible text, etc. Most search engines will penalize a page which uses spamming.

 

Pharming: redirecting users to fake websites by using a real website

 

 

Zombie Drones: computers under the control of someone else without their knowledge

 

Worm: a software program capable of reproducing itself that can spread from one computer to the next over a network; "worms take advantage of automatic file sending and receiving features found on many computers"

 

Keylogging: Keystroke logging is a diagnostic used in software development that captures the user's keystrokes. It can be useful to determine sources of error in computer systems. Such systems are also highly useful for law enforcement and espionage – for instance, providing a means to obtain passwords or encryption keys and thus bypassing other security measures

 

Piracy: the unauthorized duplication of goods protected by intellectual property law (eg copying software unlawfully)

 

Adware: Typically, adware components install alongside a shareware or freeware application. These advertisements create revenue for the software developer and are provided with initial consent from the user. Adware displays Web-based advertisements through pop-up windows or through an advertising banner that appears within a program's interface. Getting pop-up advertisements when you’re working on your computer is very annoying

 

Malware: is short for 'malicious software' and is usually used as a catch-all term to refer to any software which causes damage to a single computer, server, or computer network.

 

Virus: a software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer; "a true virus cannot spread to another computer without human assistance

 

Spim: is another name for spam through instant messaging systems.