Phishing email fraud concept – UGC NET Question

Phishing exploits human trust by sending messages that appear to come from legitimate institutions such as banks or universities. These messages typically ask users to click a link and enter passwords or other sensitive data on fake websites. The goal is to steal credentials or financial information for misuse. This deceptive practice is known as phishing.

Option A:
Option A, spooling, is a legitimate operating system technique for managing input and output operations and has no inherent fraudulent intent. It is unrelated to tricking users into revealing information.

Option B:
Option B is correct because phishing is precisely defined as attempting to acquire sensitive information by pretending to be a trustworthy entity in digital communication. The stem exactly matches this definition.

Option C:
Option C, farming, in its usual sense relates to agriculture and does not describe online fraud. Even in computing, related terms like pharming refer to different technical attacks.

Option D:
Option D, defragging, is a maintenance process that reorganises data on a disk to improve performance and has nothing to do with email based deception.