the.com/whaling

means A targeted scam that impersonates trusted contacts to trick executives or other high-value targets into wiring money or leaking sensitive data.

from Built straight from 'phishing,' which itself riffs on 'fishing' (the ph- echoing old hacker spellings like 'phreaking'). Since phishing already cast a wide net for ordinary victims, security researchers in the 2000s needed a word for when criminals went after the biggest fish in the organization — the CEO, the CFO — and 'whaling' was the obvious, grimly funny upgrade.