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Phishing and Pharming 

 Are you familiar with the terms phishing and pharming? If you spend any time surfing the internet, paying bills or banking online these are terms you need to understand.  Both phishing and pharming are Identity Theft scams designed to obtain your personal information.

Phishing: The term "phishing" – as in fishing for confidential information - refers to a scam that involves the theft of your personal and/or financial information by crooks who use the Internet or telephone to lure you into revealing your user names, passwords, bank account numbers, Social Security number, credit card numbers, expiration dates, PIN numbers, billing addresses, and telephone numbers.

Pharming:  Refers to a more sophisticated form of “phishing.”  Rather than spamming you with e-mail requests, “pharmers” secretly plant a virus, spyware or malicious program that “poisons” your Domain Name Server (DNS) and hijacks the web browser in your computer.  As a result, when you type in the address of a legitimate website, like that of your bank, credit card company or retailer, the planted program redirects you to a fraudulent site.  As far as your browser is concerned, however, you are connected to the right site.  Unfortunately, just watching the address bar on your Internet browser won't inform you of any hijacks because the URL and the fake site will look just like the legitimate site. The danger of pharming is that you don’t have to click an e-mail link to be taken to the fake site where you unknowingly hand over your personal information to identity thieves.