Over the years, humanity has technologically advanced from one level to the next. This is also true in the world of cyber crime. As the techniques cyber criminals use to carry out their treacherous acts are discovered and exposed, they advance to new techniques. Pharming attacks are a typical example. Pharming is a more advanced technique than phishing, but still geared toward stealing a victim's personal information.

Phishing lures victims through fictitious emails to get them to visit bogus sites and reveal their sensitive information. Pharming is actually a type of phishing but with the absence of 'the lure'. It involves a hacker infiltrating a computer system and installing malicious code that causes website traffic from the system to be redirected to bogus sites developed by the hacker. This is done without the victim's knowledge or consent.

Many websites require the user's personal information. Private and personal information entered into these bogus sites is then captured by the hacker. As such, customers of banks, financial, and online payment services with any form of monetary exchange are the most highly targeted.

Pharming attacks are two-fold. They deceive the computer system in use, as well as the victim using it. It deceives the computer system by changing the correct IP address information stored on the computer into different numbers that direct the traffic of the user to undesirable websites. In the case of the victims, because they type in the correct URLs to legitimate websites as opposed to clicking a link in a suspicious email, they are confident that the web pages presented to them are authentic...and more info over at Study.

In phishing, the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking e-mails, appearing to come from some of the Web's most popular sites, in an effort to obtain personal and financial information from individual recipients. But in pharming, larger numbers of computer users can be victimized because it is not necessary to target individuals one by one and no conscious action is required on the part of the victim. In one form of pharming attack, code sent in an e-mail modifies local host files on a personal computer. 

The host files convert URLs into the number strings that the computer uses to access Web sites. A computer with a compromised host file will go to the fake Web site even if a user types in the correct Internet address or clicks on an affected bookmark entry. Some spyware removal programs can correct the corruption, but it frequently recurs unless the user changes browsing habits...to know more, visit - TechTarget.

Pharming attacks do not take advantage of any new technique. They use the well known...

* DNS Cache Poisoning

* Domain Spoofing

* Domain Hijacking Techniques

...that have been around for quite long. However, the motives of carrying out these attacks have changed.

Earlier they were interested in just disrupting services and causing nuisance. But now, the game has become a matter of money than that of chest thumping. These techniques continue to exist because administrators and website owners don’t care to secure and monitor their DNS servers while they have invested millions of dollars in application firewalls.

1. The attacker targets the DNS service used by the customer. This server can be a DNS server on the LAN or the DNS server hosted by an ISP for all users. The attacker, using various techniques, manages to change the IP address of ‘www.nicebank.com’ to the IP address of a web server which contains a fake replica of nicebank.com.

2. User wants to go the website ‘www.nicebank.com’ and types the address in the web browser.

3. User’s computer queries the DNS server for the IP address of ‘www.nicebank.com’.

4. Since the DNS server has already been ‘poisoned’ by the attacker, it returns the IP address of the fake website to the user’s computer.

The user’s computer is tricked into thinking that the poisoned reply is the correct IP address of the website. The user has now been fooled into visiting fake website controlled by the attacker rather than the original www.nicebank.com website.

Once the attacker has managed to get the user to visit the fake website, there are many ways in which the user can be tricked into revealing his / her credentials or giving out personal information. The beauty, or let’s say, the notoriety of pharming over phishing is evident from the fact that one successful attempt in poisoning the DNS server can be potentially used to trick all the users of that DNS service. Much less effort and wider impact than phishing...to read more, go to - UKEssays.

First off, it’s useful to know that DNS servers are usually owned by the ISP that you use. As such, in order to avoid pharming attacks against DNS servers, make sure you pick a reliable ISP. Good ISPs will know about pharming and will have countermeasures to protect their servers from being poisoned.

But what is pharming’s weakness when it comes to infecting your own computer’s files? First, always make sure you have a good antivirus or anti-malware solution installed. These should hopefully be able to detect an edit to your computer’s address cache file and alert you before any damage is done.

Even without antivirus, however, you can stop a pharming attack by using your wits. When you access a popular or secure website, such as social media or banking sites, you’ll see a padlock in the address bar and “HTTPS” at the start of the URL. This means the website has been validated by an authoritative third party to be what it claims to be. As such, it’s been awarded a certificate, and its communications have been encrypted.

Of course, if a pharming attack has redirected you to a spoof site, that site shouldn’t have a certificate identifying it as genuine. Even if the URL looks identical to the real thing, the sight of a missing certificate is a dead giveaway. When logging into a popular site, make sure the HTTPS certificate is present. If you’ve noticed that the certificate has suddenly “gone missing,” something might be afoot!..visit - maketecheasier to know more.

Scammers or hackers will also try to steal your website information and fool you into entering your personal information. PhishProtection can help you to counter all of these phishing techniques used by hackers all over the world.