Pharming occurs when a hacker redirects website traffic from a legitimate website to the hacker's fraudulent website by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Domain Name System (DNS). By corrupting a computer's knowledge of how a site's domain name maps to its IP address, the attacker causes the victim's computer to communicate with the wrong server—a technique known as domain hijacking.
By constructing a fake web site that looks like a legitimate site that might ask for the user's personal information, such as a copy of a bank's website, the fraudster can "phish", or steal by means of false pretenses, a victim's passwords, PIN or bank account number. The combination of domain hijacking with a phishing website constitutes farming.
Although many such sites use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to identify themselves cryptographically and prevent such fraud, SSL offers no protection if users ignore their web browsers' warnings about invalid SSL server certificates. Such warnings occur when a user connects to a server whose SSL certificate does not match the address of the server.
In 2004, a German teenager hijacked the eBay.de domain. In January 2005, the domain name of Panix, a large New York ISP, was hijacked to a site in Australia.
Anti-pharming technologies are available.
Read more about this topic: Internet Fraud