As if simple phishing wasn’t enough that hackers started coming up with more and more dangerous forms of phishing like pharming. It follows the same principle of making the user reveal sensitive info. However, it requires a specific skill set. Precisely, only highly skilled hackers can carry out pharming.
One example of a pharming attack that almost robbed the popular TV celeb Barbara Corcoran of a whopping $400000 was a slight modification to her email ID. The real one was @barbaracorcoran.com and the poisoned email was sent from @barbaracorcran.com. See how similar the two email IDs look? These are the ways that hackers use.
Another trick that they use is creating a fake duplicate website name by making such similar tweaks. Now, here’s the catch – you identify a website by its name, for example, www.google.com. That’s not how the computers recognize it though.
Computer systems recognize a website by its IP address. Hackers somehow trick the DNS of the system by releasing some sort of malware. As a result, your computer will actually take you to the fake duplicate site. The changes done to the domain name would be so precise that you won’t be able to notice them directly. And that’s how hackers will steal your info – you’ll fill your financial or login credentials thinking that you’re on the real website when, actually, you’ll be on a malicious website.
So, whether it’s a hacked camera or a hacked DVR, everything gives hackers a remote access and the hacked devices are used as hosts to release malware in other systems. That said, since hackers have become so smart, it’s important that users become smart too. Some such smart ways to reduce phishing attempts are as follows.
- Check the email ID carefully before clicking on any link that has come as an attachment or even as a part of the email body.
- Be very mindful of not entertaining emails from sources that you can’t recognize.
- Always install a firewall in your system and make sure that you have changed the default password to something that’s unique and strong.
- Make it a habit of never using public Wi-Fi. Those are the ones that hackers target a lot.
Other advanced web security techniques that organizations can use are MFA, network segmentation, and VPN Solutions. To sum up, make sure you practice as many clean browsing habits as possible since they are the best ways to prevent pharming and other kinds of targeted phishing like spear phishing and vishing.