Pharming Attack Designs

Abstract

Pharming is emerging as a major new Internet security threat. Pharming has overtaken “phishing” as the most dangerous Internet scam tactic, according to the latest Internet Security Intelligence Briefing (Veri-Sign, 2005). Pharming attacks exploit the design and implementation flaws in DNS services and the way Internet addresses are resolved to Internet protocol (IP) addresses. There are an estimated 7.5 million external DNS servers on the public Internet (MF-Survey, 2006). Pharming attacks manipulate components of the domain and host naming systems to redirect Internet entering personal and sensitive information on their fake site. Financial services’ sites are often the targets of these attacks, in which criminals try to acquire personal information in order to access bank accounts, steal identities, or commit other kinds of fraud. The use of faked Web sites makes pharming sound similar to e-mail phishing scams, but pharming is more insidious, since users are redirected to a false site without any participation or knowledge on their part. Pharming is technically harder to accomplish than phishing, but also sneakier because it can be done without any active mistake on the part of the victim (Violino, 2005). The greatest security threat lies in the fact that a successful pharming attack leaves no information on the user’s computer to indicate that anything is wrong.