An up-and-coming leader in network gateways for SMB, Untangle recently said to have integrated web safety to its Identity Theft Blocker application. The app, besides filtering out phishing emails, now claims to stop pharming websites. This alteration was brought in return to the on the increase threat that identity theft represents on the web and the on the rise complexity of pharming assaults.
Pharming websites impersonate legal sites such as banking or ecommerce and make use of social engineering to swindle users into parting with their user names, passwords and other confidential info while they by mistake log into the fake sites. The web properties frequently make use of URLs that give the impression of being similar to the target site.
For instance, replacing the “w” in wells fargo with two “v”s (vvellsfargo.com), adding an extra “i” to wachoviia.net, or by prefixing the target domain to the pharmer’s url, such as paypal.phishingsite.com.
Besides, pharming sites have turned out to be so well developed that visually making out the actual from the bogus has been almost without a solution.
Dirk Morris, founder and chief technology officer of Untangle, was quoted as saying,
Pharming is big business and the sites and techniques continue to become more and more sophisticated. Even Google Adwords has been used by cyber-criminals to bait victims. Our customers count on us to keep them up-to-date with the latest in security, and Untangle is pleased to provide this additional layer of protection for their users and networks.
