Archived on Mon Mar 14 16:48:23 2005
Hackers appear to have an increasing interest in reaping financial reward from their actions and creations If until now, phishing -. Using emails to lure users into entering data into spoofed online banking websites - was one of the most widespread fraud techniques, 'pharming' now poses an even greater threat. Basically, pharming involves interfering with the name resolution process on the Internet. When a user enters an address (such as www.pandasoftware.com) this needs to be converted into a numeric IP address as 62.14.63.187. This is known as name resolution, and the task is performed by DNS (Domain name System) servers. These servers store tables with the IP address of each domain name. On a smaller scale, in each computer connected to the Internet there is a file That Stores A Table with the names of servers and ip addressary to access the dns servers for ceerting, so that desolution system model ser thinks he or she is accessing to bank's web page, he or she is actually accessing the IP of a spoofed site. Phishing owed its success to social engineering techniques, despite that not all users take the phishing bait, and so this success was limited . Also, each phishing attack was aimed at one specific type of banking service, further reducing the chances of success. Pharming on the other hand, can affect a far greater number of online banking users. In addition, pharming isn '
