Many people are familiar with Phishing, but few know anything about Pharming. Phishing is when you receive an email from what seems to be a legitimate source but actually it’s from someone trying to obtain your personal online information posing as either your bank, investment firm or credit card company. What they want is for you to email them your personal identification information, online banking information or other info such as your date of birth or social security number.
These emails are so well done that I almost fell victim to their scam. Luckily I decided to contact my bank via phone to make sure. It took them over 3 hrs for them to call me back and let me know it was fraudulent. They admitted that even they were almost fooled. A large number of Citibank customers were not so lucky and became victims to these scams last year. Citibank was forced to recently make changes to both their customer emails and to their online banking websites in order to prevent more victims of phishing expeditions.
Not heard of Pharming much? You will soon as the ISC reported that in February of this year over 1300 Internet domains were redirected to compromised web servers, where unsuspecting customers thought they were logging on to legitimate sites to conduct their electronic business. In March that number increased by 1.8%. Here’s a list of a few sites which have suffered from Pharming hackers:
Banking: bankofamerica.com, bankone.com, chase.com, wachovia.com, and wellsfargo.com
Brokerage: sharebuilder.com
Email: msn.com, and yahoo.com
Travel: aa.com, continental.com, and united.com
Pharming is a relatively new and dangerous way for internet fraudsters to obtain all your personal information with your help. These fraudsters exploit people’s natural curiosity via pop-up windows, planting crimeware onto your PC. They steal your credentials directly from you by using Trojan keylogger spyware that sends back to its creator information regarding where you visited and what information you typed to access that site. Hackers can also misdirect users to fraudulent sites or proxy servers, typically through DNS hijacking or poisoning to make you believe you’re at a legitimate site, then steal enough personal identification or data from you to enable them to access your online banking and credit card accounts.
Tomorrow I’ll post tips on how you can prevent from giving away the pharm!