If you operate an online business, but have never heard of the term “pharming”, you’ll want to read this article as I’ll show you what it is, how it can impact your business and how to help avoid these malicious attacks.
Pharming attacks take place when a hacker has poisoned your DNS servers via a virus of some type and redirects visitors to your site to another site. Your customers still think it’s your site because the domain name remains the same in their browser. When your customer decides to make a purchase and enters their information into the order form, the hacker grabs it and cleans out their credit card or bank account.
The two most common ways for hackers to get the virus onto your server is by sending you an email and by a hacker is able to alter your DNS causing your domain to be redirected to a bogus domain when anyone types in your URL. The second method is far more damaging because it can impact a much larger number of visitors. This can be an especially expensive problem to resolve once you are hit by a pharming attack.
Unfortunately, there is no standard way for visitors to know for sure they are visiting a legitimate site or a fake site. There are programs that are in place by some anti virus software companies that are able to detect some of these sites, but not all. As an individual user, the best advice for avoiding falling victim to a pharming attack include:
1. Keep your firewall updated and in operation at all times.
2. Be sure your anti virus software is up to date in in operation at all times.
3. Be sure to subscribe to automatic updates from your OS provider. This way, any and all security patches will be installed on a regular basis.
As a business owner, protecting your site from a pharming attack isn’t all that easy to be honest. At this point in time, there is no sure fire method for stopping them from happening to you. The best defense is to contact your hosting company to make sure that the servers your site are running on are up to date with the latest DNS software and that all security patches are installed. With most of the major hosting companies, this is standard operating procedure, but it only makes good sense to verify this with them.
If you are running off of your own in house server, be sure that the person who is handling this part of the business for you has done the same thing.
