What is Vishing?

Understanding Vishing

The use of public switched telephone network to fish for personal and financial details from the public. Vishing short for voice phishing is a social engineering attack where attackers use phone calls to trick victims into revealing sensitive information or taking harmful actions. Attackers often spoof caller ID impersonate trusted entities like banks or technical support and create scenarios that instill urgency or fear to manipulate victims. Vishing is addressed in security awareness frameworks social engineering standards and customer protection guidelines. Organizations protect against vishing through employee training verification procedures published contact policies and authentication protocols. For example a financial institution might protect customers from vishing by implementing callback verification procedures where employees never ask for complete passwords over the phone educating customers about legitimate contact methods establishing clear policies that the bank will never call asking for credentials and implementing out-of-band authentication for sensitive transactions to prevent vishing-based fraud. Related terms Social engineering Phishing Voice phishing Phone fraud Caller ID spoofing Pretexting Social engineering attack Impersonation Security awareness Scam call.