Pharming: A Growing Threat

[al1aprize]

now everyone's starting to talk about pharming. Sounds familiar. Like the old scam when people used to send an email and in the email a link would send them to a Paypal "site" or something the ask them to enter info and then the people get the info. Maybe its the same but now its getting more attention.

[wiskic10_4]

What? No "No, but I hope it will really soon" or "Yes, and I can't wait until it does again" options... Bah! I suppose a simple "Yes" or "No" would have sufficed, then?

-Wiski

[Edit] Also, define "affect"... I mean, I suppose it's affected the majority of us, even if it's only a minor annoyance...[/Edit]

[Double//Cut]

The only decent pharming technique I have seen is via local network and spoofers, being DNS / ARP etc. I The threat of phishing or pharming will always be a low threat for me, every decent effort I have seen of replicating sites has always be foiled by a simple error. By now, if something smells a little phishy, I take extra care, my online banking is kept at a minimum, and if the site looks slightly wrong, takes a little too long to load, or accesses the wrong servers, i'll simply type my password in wrong and check in deeper.

However, pharming techniques on a larger scale, imo, if implemented correctly can be devastating, ie the recent www.googkle.com, or which ever the spelling error was. Opened a few popups and started download malware of all kindas onto your system. However, it has been removed from (atleast my ISP's) DNS registrar so it no longer posses a threat. Once again, because it wasnt implemented correctly.

I do not agree it is a growing threat, there are different techniques to do it now, however, they are more complex and on a large scale, they are not a threat, every other attack hasnt been successful because the attacker was 'lazy' or didnt implement the attack with enough error checking, foiling his/her attempts...

Just my opinion