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admin · Site Admin Joined: 23 Jan 2003 Posts: 256 Location: India

More sophisticated than phishing, pharming involves hijacking an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) domain name server entries. When the "pharmer" succeeds, every computer using that ISP for Internet access is directed to the wrong site when the user types a URL.

By protecting your Web site with a SSL certificate, Internet users attempting to access a site posing as yours are instantly alerted that there is a problem with the supposedly secure connection:

1. No lock icon: Because a Certification Authority (CA) usually won't issue a certificate to fraudulent pharming sites, such sites usually do not use SSL encryption. Internet users are alerted by the absence of a padlock icon in their browser's status bar.

2. Name mismatch error: A pharming site could try to use a certificate issued by a CA for a domain owned by the attacker, but the user's browser will warn the user that the visited URL does not match the certificate presented by the fake Web server.

3. Untrusted CA: A pharming site might attempt to use a certificate issued by an untrusted CA. In this case, the user's browser will generate the following warning: "the security certificate was issued by a company you have not chosen to trust."

Alert Internet users will instantly abandon their activities when presented with such warnings. A SSL certificate provides business owners and wary, savvy Internet users an effective weapon against pharming.
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