Cybercriminals take advantage of people’s carelessness to obtain passwords, ID numbers, home addresses, bank accounts and other personal information. Straying onto a fake website is one way they do it. This article explains what “pharming” is and how to spot and prevent it.
Imagine you’re in your car on your way to a house in the country to spend a few days on holiday. You follow all the directions for getting there, including a right turn that, without realizing, steers you away from your destination. You end up somewhere and don’t know why nor how you did. That’s how “pharming” works online. It’s a trick in which legitimate websites or servers are tampered with to redirect users to fake websites that capture their personal info or even their money.
“Pharming” is the portmanteau of “phishing” (i.e. impersonation on email or text messages) and server “farms” that redirect users to fraudulent websites.
Whether you’re an Internet amateur or expert, the key to understanding this scam lies in how you browse online. To visit a website, you normally write its address in the browser or click on a direct link. The browser turns the information into a numerical Internet Protocol (or “IP”) address for a specific server to show the website’s content. Internet browsing works this way because a name is much easier to remember than a set of numbers.
Cybercriminals are on the lookout to make sure you don’t open the website you want and take…
