Pharming - The Hard to Detect Threat

Via Ha.ckers.org -

Am I going to have to eat my words? I was thumbing through some AV reports over the last few days and one report stuck out at me. Granted, I don’t follow each worm (not enough hours in the day for all the things I’d like to explore) but I was surprised to see a worm that had to do with Pharming. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, unlike phishing, pharming takes a more proactive approach by forcing people’s DNS entries to point to a different/malicious server. Frankly, I thought it was mostly the stuff of science fiction since no one could point to a single example of any instance of pharming greater than 100 people (a single ISP that got it’s DNS compromised). Granted, the trojan doesn’t mention pharming but that is the obvious next step if it isn’t already doing it (rather than just trying to get some click-through traffic on some websites).

Trojan.Flush.K also known as Trojan.Dnschanger modifies DNS entries on your Windows box and attempts to forward you to a malicious website. The obvious synergies with phishing attacks make this particular one stand out at me. Symantec rated this one very low (probably to do both with the lack of virulence and the ease of cleaning the system), but it’s interesting to note how potentially dangerous this could be if it were more widespread and written with more malice.

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Your general public has no hope if detecting this treat. This is even a hard detection for security professionals. When is the last time you looked at your HOSTS file? Or checked for a static DNS server in your IP settings?

Exactly.