Jane, an individual, has recently been calling various financial offices pretending to be another person to
gain financial information. Which of the following attacks is being described?

A.
Phishing

B.
Tailgating

C.
Pharming

D.
Vishing

Explanation:
Vishing (voice or VoIP phishing) is an electronic fraud tactic in which individuals are tricked into revealing
critical financial or personal information to unauthorized entities. Vishing works like phishing but does not
always occur over the Internet and is carried out using voice technology. A vishing attack can be
conducted by voice email, VoIP (voice over IP), or landline or cellular telephone.
The potential victim receives a message, often generated by speech synthesis, indicating that suspicious
activity has taken place in a credit card account, bank account, mortgage account or other financial
service in their name. The victim is told to call a specific telephone number and provide information to
“verify identity” or to “ensure that fraud does not occur.” If the attack is carried out by telephone, caller
ID spoofing can cause the victim’s set to indicate a legitimate source, such as a bank or a government
agency.
Vishing is difficult for authorities to trace, particularly when conducted using VoIP. Furthermore, like
many legitimate customer services, vishing scams are often outsourced to other countries, which may
render sovereign law enforcement powerless.
Consumers can protect themselves by suspecting any unsolicited message that suggests they are targets
of illegal activity, no matter what the medium or apparent source. Rather than calling a number given in
any unsolicited message, a consumer should directly call the institution named, using a number that is
known to be valid, to verify all recent activity and to ensure that the account information has not been
tampered with.Incorrect Answers:
A: Phishing is the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate
enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for
identity theft.
Phishing email will direct the user to visit a website where they are asked to update personal information,
such as a password, credit card, social security, or bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization
already has. The website, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the information the user enters on
the page.
Phishing emails are blindly sent to thousands, if not millions of recipients. By spamming large groups of
people, the “phisher” counts on the email being read by a percentage of people who actually have an
account with the legitimate company being spoofed in the email and corresponding webpage. In this
question, Jane uses the telephone so this is an example of vishing rather than phishing.
B: Tailgating in IT security would be an unauthorized person following and authorized person into a
building or room such as a datacenter. If a building has a card reader where an authorized person can
hold up a card to the reader to unlock the door, someone tailgating could follow the authorized person
into the building by walking through the door before it closes and locks. This is not what is described in
the question.
C: Similar in nature to e-mail phishing, pharming seeks to obtain personal or private (usually financial
related) information through domain spoofing. Rather than being spammed with malicious and
mischievous e-mail requests for you to visit spoof Web sites which appear legitimate, pharming ‘poisons’
a DNS server by infusing false information into the DNS server, resulting in a user’s request being
redirected elsewhere. Your browser, however will show you are at the correct Web site, which makes
pharming a bit more serious and more difficult to detect. Phishing attempts to scam people one at a time
with an e-mail while pharming allows the scammers to target large groups of people at one time through
domain spoofing. This is not what is described in the question.

http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/definition/vishing
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/phishing.html
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/pharming.html