Phishing or Pharming?
Techweb have published a new article highlighting the shift from Phishing to Pharming.
Basically instead of sending out emails pretending to be banks or online auctions sites, and getting you to type your security details into a fake webpage, instead they’re now using spyware and trojans to infect your PC, alter various settings in Windows, so that when you type the name of your bank or auction site into your browser (any browser, IE, Firefox, mozilla, Opera and all the rest) it’ll take you to the fake site, not the real one, and you’ll never know the difference.
The usual advice applies - “Don’t open unexpected file attachments, of course, and change passwords often.
http://www.techweb.com/rss/159907254 for the full article.
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Security experts say pharming is more sinister than phishing
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…
I am happy to tell you that Green Armor Solutions just released a technology that enables a company to make it easy for its customers to know whether they are communicating with the company’s real site or with a phony site. The system is EASY FOR USERS TO USE — since they don’t really have to register, memorize anything, or do anything extra during a login.
And it works against both phishing and pharming.
See for yourself:
http://www.greenarmor.com
Indeed, there are several systems that claim to protect against both Phishing and Pharming - my personal choice (as a Firefox user) is the Netcraft toolbar: http://www.netcraft.com/
There are many others which claim to be able to tell the difference and protect you - however if they rely on DNS, then they’re as vulnerable as the browsers to the same tricks.
Ideally, an Anti-Pharming tool would cache the DNS records of sites, and warn you if the site you’re using has had it’s DNS modified.