Pharming
Pharming is a type of phishing that does not use e-mail to obtain information but that uses an application which is already installed on the victims' machine which sends the information in the background to the attacker. The victim doesn't even realize that it's happening.
Good anti-malware protection is the first step to take when trying to prevent getting infected with pharming-malware as well as browser-protection that warns you when you try to access a malicious source in the first place.
Phishing
Generally spoken: the practise of getting access to critical (mostly) personal information (identity, creditcard-number, passwords etc.) by sending misleading e-mails, messages, showing malicious webpage-links etc. and/or inviting persons to install malicious applications (malware).
Phishing is a type of social engineering.
Phishing can include: Pharming, Spoofing, Typosquatting, Clickjacking (often by iframe overlay) and Tabnabbing.
Mostly, phishing attacks come in large numbers of messages sent to random people, where the idea is that the more messages are being send, the more chance there is to success. Next to that we know the term "spear phishing", which is a form of phishing targeted at a specific organization or group of people (like CEO´s or employees (whale-phishing)). Forms of spear phishing are: Clone phishing, Whaling and BEC (business email compromise).
Phishing can often be indentified through misspelled texts, unknown attachments and a sense of urgency and importance in the message, best is never to react to any messages that are uncommon. If you are not 100% sure, contact the organization of which the message appears to be coming from to find out if they really did send it and never give any personal information like passwords etc. to others: authorities, banks etc. will never require you to do so.
