What is the difference between phishing and pharming?

Both are entirely made-up terms, of course. "Phishing" generally refers to those e-mail messages that say they're from a bank (or eBay or PayPal or your ISP), but the links actually go to some other web site where the phisher (still pretending to be a bank) asks for your information, and will use it to steal your identity, money, etcetera.



"Pharming" is another twist on the same thing, using more devious tricks. In phishing mail you can usually figure out that the site you're about to visit isn't really your bank. So for "pharming," they'll first trick you into running a program (see "trojans," "malware," "spyware," etcetera) that changes the way your computer looks up domain names. Then, the pharmer can tell your computer that bank.com is some web server in Russia, and it's much harder to figure out that something's wrong.



There's some good info about these kinds of scams at http://antispam.yahoo.com/faqs#a13 .What is the difference between phishing and pharming?
J.D. did a good job on this answer.