Pharm crisis

Wired News looks at pharming, the latest cyberscam to step into the spotlight -- and potentially, the hardest one for most people to detect. Pharming silently redirects browsers to counterfeit Web pages when users try to load the URLs for real commercial sites, tricking them into entering personal information.

The scammers employ tactics ranging from malware that rewrites infected computers' hosts files, telling them to use bogus sites' IP address for common domains, to DNS poisoning, which enters the false information in the upstream address translation system.

In any case, it's hard to tell if you fall into a pharmer's trap because, as far as your browser's concerned, it is going to the legitimate site you specified:

"Phishing is to pharming what a guy with a rod and a reel is to a Russian trawler. Phishers have to approach their targets one by one. Pharmers can scoop up many victims in a single pass," said Chris Risley, president and chief executive officer of Nominum, a provider of IP address infrastructure technology for businesses.