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It was the phishing scams, which were doing the rounds on the internet for a long time, but now things have turned from bad to worse. Earlier only individuals were being tricked into giving away their personal details and financial information but now the criminals have gotten much smarter and are targeting groups of victims. Phishing and Pharming have thus become two monsters of the internet world you have to constantly protect yourself from.
In pharming, criminals target the domain name server system and they create a fake web site, which resembles the original. People wishing to see the original web sites are instead directed to the fake website.
Phishing and Pharming has made the internet much more vulnerable and pharming is taking place at an alarming proportion where multitudes of unsuspecting visitors to the websites are being duped into visiting identical fake websites and in the process losing valuable personal and financial information.
In Pharming, users are simply redirected to from the original commercial website which they had wanted to visit to malicious websites created by these unscrupulous elements. These bogus websites look so real and authentic like the original web sites that many new and innocent users would be fooled. It is when the users log in their name and password that the information is caught by the criminals. They then use this to ruin the users. DNS pharming or Domain Name System pharming is the most dangerous method used to con thousands of people using the internet. Here even if the users type the URL they would be lead to the bogus websites. In Phishing, the criminals send only individual emails enticing the users. Unsuspecting users would fall for the trap, click on the link provided in the email, and give away all their personal and financial information. Criminals then use the information provided to swindle the user.
One more difference between Phishing and Pharming is that in phishing, though the criminals send out thousands of such emails only a few innocent users fall into the trap but in pharming since the domain server itself is targeted the number of users who unsuspectingly log on to the web sites is much higher.
Pharming criminals use the websites of banks, credit card companies, and financial institutions to replicate their bogus websites to do pharming. So check out if the website has been authorized before, you log on to it. This may take you some time and effort, but doing this will make sure you are hundred percent protected from being vulnerable to fraud.
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