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May 15, 2005
Security experts say pharming is more sinister than phishing
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First online crooks went "phishing," and now they're getting into "pharming" to reap their harvest of potential identity-theft victims. Pharming is a new scam that automatically directs computer users from a legitimate Web site to a fraudulent copy of that site, without any warning signs. The fraudulent site collects passwords, credit-card numbers or other private information for potential misuse. Security experts say such attacks are rare so far but could grow in the coming months in much the same way phishing scams have exploded. |
Some security experts think pharming is more sinister than phishing because it can be harder to detect. Phishing uses e-mail spam to deliver fake messages, designed to look like they're coming from banks or other legitimate companies, to lure many individual customers into revealing personal or financial information. Pharming operates through fake Web sites. It cuts out the need for a response from the victim as required by phishing schemes, where the recipient of the scam e-mail must open the message and link to the bogus site. Pharming exploits an underlying Internet technology -- known as the Domain Name System, or DNS -- used to translate a Web site's address into a numerical code for the Internet routing. [via duluth] |
Posted by geekblue at May 15, 2005 12:51 AM
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