Get IT Sorted News Letter

 

Spyware, Phishing and Pharming

Spyware

Spyware is a software component which finds it's way onto a computer and releases information from that computer. This threat is similar to the threats from viruses but it seeks your "information" and not necessarily to cause harm to your computer or data.

Phishing

The technique has been around for years and the art of Phishing is to trick the user into clicking on a link or visiting a website and fool them into thinking that they are actually performing a legitimate request, such as online banking or paying bills. The people behind the phishing attacks are making use of the recent Internet Explorer security issues in order to devise foolproof methods of catching victims. Phishing often involves URL obfuscation, Which is a technique by which they can hide the true URL location the web browser is visiting.

Pharming

Pharmers simply redirect as many users as possible from the legitimate commercial websites they'd intended to visit and lead them to malicious ones. The bogus sites, to which victims are redirected without their knowledge or consent, will most likely look the same as a genuine site. But when users enter their login name and password, the information is captured by criminals. E-mailed viruses that rewrite local host files on individual PCs, like the Banker Trojan, have been used to conduct smaller-scale pharming attacks. Host files convert standard URLs into the numeric strings a computer understands. A computer with a compromised host file will go to the wrong website even if a user types in the correct URL. Pharmers aim to poison DNS servers with incorrect entries to point the users of the DNS servers to their mallicious sites.