Phoraging

In the field of computer security, Phoraging (pronounced foraging) is defined as a process of collecting data from many different online sources to build up the identity of someone with the ultimate aim of committing identity theft. Along with phishing and pharming, this is the "third P" of cybercrime.

Phoraging is a concept similar in many ways to phishing, pharming, and information diving; and is similar to Mosaic theory in finance.

Phoraging is searching for information usually with the aim of identity theft whereby a criminal collects data from a variety of different online sources to build up the identity of a consumer to commit identity theft. Crooks phorage for information from a variety of different sources including social networking sites, public records phishing attacks, or confidential information submitted in an unsecured way to websites, as well as computer viruses and spyware. They put this data together to guess passwords and the answers to security questions with the ultimate aim of stealing money. PC Pro referred to this concept in their January 2009 issue.[1] Security vendor VeriSign [2] also use refer to this term [3] while the UK Office of Fair Trading defines phoraging as a tactic used by "fraudsters who aggregate personal information from multiple sources with the intent of misusing an individual's identity; a tactic known as 'phoraging."[4]