In both pharming and phishing attacks an attacker can create websites that look similar to legitimate sites with the intent of collecting personal identifiable information from its victims. What is…

In a pharming attack, the attacker corrupts DNS records or modifies the victim's hosts file so that a legitimate domain name resolves to a malicious IP address, redirecting the victim even when they type the correct URL manually. This DNS-level or host-level redirection is the core technical distinction separating pharming from phishing. Phishing, by contrast, depends on social engineering to trick users into clicking a fraudulent link delivered via email or messaging.

Phishing is fundamentally a social engineering attack that manipulates users through deceptive emails or messages, making this claim that it is purely technical incorrect.

Pharming and phishing are distinct attack categories that use different redirection mechanisms, so claiming they are identical is technically incorrect.

Host configuration modification (DNS or hosts file tampering) is the defining technique of pharming, not phishing - phishing uses deceptive communications to lure victims rather than silently hijacking their DNS resolution.