Phishing and Pharming attacks

Phishing spoofing attack is a combination of e-mail spoofing and Web site spoofing attack. Phishing attacker starts the phishing attack by sending bulk e-mails impersonating a web site they have spoofed. Normally the phishing attack emails seems to be from legitimate financial organizations like banks, alerting the user that they need to login to their account for one reason or another. The link also will be provided in the email which is a fake web site, which is designed very similar to the bank web site. Normally the link’s anchor text will be the real URL of the bank’s website but anchor will be a URL with IP address of the web site which is in attacker’s control. Once the user enters the userid/password combination and submits those values, the attacker collect those values and the web page is redirected to the real site.

Pharming is another spoofing attack, where the attacker tampers the DNS (Domain Name System) so that traffic to a Web site is secretly redirected to a fake site altogether, even though the browser seems to be displaying the Web address you wanted to visit.