A.P. Lawrence

2005/03/19 pharming

Guess they had to have new word, didn't they? Well, what they are now calling "pharming" is just DNS hacking. It's scary because it's not like phishing where you are tricked into clicking on a link that doesn't take you where you think it will. This is worse, because your DNS gives you a fake address for a legitimate site address.

There is more than one way that can happen: corruption of a real DNS server either by hacking into it or by presenting false credentials ("I'm from Citibank, and we need to update our DNS"), or by hacking a PC and screwing up its DNS. Either way it's not pretty.

Read more at http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-5670780-1.html?tag=nl.e497 and http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2005-03-13

I mentioned this to someone who responded saying that they flush their DNS cache regularly (in Windows that's "ipconfig /flushdns"; on Unix that's a much more complex subject and probably unnecessary anyway). That certainly isn't harmful, but it's not going to help against this sort of poisoning.

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