A client-side anti-pharming (CSAP) approach

Abstract

Pharming is a type of social engineering attack wherein an attacker wants to steal sensitive information of internet users. Pharming is advanced technique than Phishing attack. In phishing, attacker's URL is different from targeted legitimate website URL but in case of pharming, attacker's URL is same to legitimate URL. Pharming attacks can be conducted by exploiting vulnerabilities in DNS server, which is more advanced type of attack than phishing. It's a special attack because the attacker doesn't have to target individual user. When attacker performs pharming on a Domain Name System (DNS) server, all users who are using DNS service through that server will fall victim of pharming attack. Various techniques are proposed for avoiding pharming attack. We present an approach which uses multiple DNS servers.