Defeating pharming attacks at the client-side

With the deployment of “always-connected” broadband Internet access, personal networks are a privileged target for attackers and DNS-based corruption. Pharming attacks - an enhanced version of phishing attacks - aim to steal users´ credentials by redirecting them to a fraudulent login website, using DNS-based techniques that make the attack imperceptible to the end-user. In this paper, we define an advanced approach to alert the end-user in case of pharming attacks at the client-side. With a success rate over 95%, we validate a solution that can help differentiating legitimate from fraudulent login websites, based on a dual-step analysis (IP address check and webpage content comparison) performed using multiple DNS servers information.