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Pharming
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The
scam popularly known as ‘phishing’ – email messages
trying to deceive you into surrendering personal information
over the Internet – today is well known. Competing
with it more and more for headlines is a newer scam: pharming. Valley
Savings Bank wants to take a moment to offer you information
about pharming, in our ongoing effort to keep our customers
informed about issues that could impact their online banking
experience. Phishing
requires victims to voluntarily visit a criminal’s
website; pharming simply redirects victims to fraudulent
websites without assistance. Pharming subverts a basic
service of the Internet known as the ‘Domain Name
Service,’ or ‘DNS.’ Each machine connected to
the Internet knows the location of one or more DNS servers.
This service translates a human-friendly URL name such as
www.valleysavingsbank.com into an IP address, which is a
unique number that has been assigned to each web server on
the Internet. To
execute pharming, suspects first must gain access to the DNS
server used by many people, such as the server of an ISP.
Once accessed, the suspect will replace the IP number for
the financial institution’s URL with the IP number of his
or her fraudulent website. When this occurs, any
person using that DNS server will be redirected, silently,
to the fraudulent website. The
good news is pharming requires either an unpatched
software/server vulnerability to exist on the DNS server
itself, or the criminal needs an insider at the ISP or
financial institution to make unauthorized DNS server
changes. This is rare. Please
be assured that Valley Savings Bank manages and updates its
DNS server’s software to maintain a high level of
security. We maintain the highest standards; our
customers are protected from pharming that would result from
a compromise of our DNS server. If
you are suspicious about a website, consider contacting the
FBI’s Internet Fraud Complaint Center at www.ifccfbi.gov.
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Main
Office 330.923.0454 |
Cuyahoga
Falls 330.928.8550 |
Stow 330.686-0044 |
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