What is Spoofing? An Introduction

Spoofing attacks are simple yet effective scams that can catch even the most cautious users off guard.

Have you ever received a suspicious email that checks all the boxes: email ID, your name and details, but suspiciously asks you to follow a link, download a file or log in to a service? You check the sender details again and notice something strange. A different character in the domain name – a difference that is barely noticeable unless you’re certain how the original sender ID should look like. For example, example@ämazon.com instead of example@amazon.com. Notice the difference here?

The spoofing email scam may indicate an urgency to change your PayPal or Amazon login credentials using a malicious link. By clicking the link, you could automatically start a silent download process in the background or route to a fake Amazon website replicating the original.

In this article, we will dive further into what spoofing is, types of spoofing and tips to reduce the risk of falling victim to this scam.

What is spoofing?

Spoofing involves impersonating a legitimate entity to trick unsuspecting targets and carry out malicious activities. The intention of a spoofing cam is to force the victim into clicking a malicious link, which then may either:

• Install malware payload on their system.
• Share sensitive details such as login credentials.

A spoofing email, for instance, may include fake but very convincing messages. Once a victim falls prey to the spoofing attack, threat actors can gain access to the compromised systems and user accounts. They use this access to leak sensitive business information from corporate networks or lock out a user out of their email accounts, holding them hostage in exchange for ransom. A silent attachment may also infect your network and engage all computing resources as DDoS attack bots to be used in high-profile criminal cyber-attacks.

While there may be several kinds of spoofing: email, URL, GPS, text and caller ID spoofing, they all share the common theme of impersonation. The attempt is often subtle, which explains the high success rate of spoofing attacks.

In fact, such attempts make up one of the largest proportions of cybercrime activities. Around 3.4 billion emails — that’s 1.2% of all email traffic — involves spoofing attempts. Around one third of all security breaches result from spear phishing emails that use spoofing as means to impersonate a trusted source entity.

Spoofing types and tips

As it turns out, spoofing is a very naive approach to compromise a target. It is effective because it relies on scale: even the most careful users can be caught off guard and fall victim to these attacks. You can deal with a spoofing attack by simply identifying a subtle yet clear impersonation attempt and then ignoring or blocking the sender.

The following types and tips can help you reduce the risk of social engineering attack attempts such as spoofing based spear-phishing attacks.

Email spoofing

When a forged email address is used, it may use similar looking alphabet characters or a typo in the email domain. Common solutions include reading the email address and text carefully. Look out for inconsistencies, typos and unconventional alphabets, especially in the domain name. Do not click a URL but hover your mouse over the URLs and look at the URL address identified by the browser. Does it appear suspicious? Anti-phishing and spam filtering tools can also help protect against these emails.

IP spoofing

The communication data packet may include forged IP address and protocol data. This tricks network switches to route the traffic to a target server while impersonating a different source. Common solutions include packet filtering, authentication protocols and real-time network monitoring.

DNS spoofing

The DNS records, which map the website URL name to the backend server IP address are manipulated. This allows threat actors to route traffic from a legitimate website to a malicious one. It is therefore important to use trusted DNS servers and continuously monitor DNS traffic. From a user perspective, if a website takes too long to load and routes to several addresses before reaching an apparently legitimate entity, it probably involves DNS spoofing.

ARP spoofing

IP addresses can change frequently, and a valid IP address must map to a legitimate underlying physical resource. Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a mechanism to ensure that physical machines with their fixed MAC address and LAN always correctly map to the valid IP addresses. ARP spoofing falsifies this mapping, allowing threat actors to send spoofed ARP messages to devices in the LAN. These messages associate physical devices to a different host that may contain malicious payload. As a solution, you can use static ARP mappings, segment your networks based on security sensitivity and risk, and use monitoring tools to inspect ARP messages at the network edge.

GPS spoofing

Broadcasting fake location signals to a GPS receiver, misleading other devices that also on the same GPS receiver for location information of other GPS devices. As a solution, technology vendors and telecommunication providers rely on signal authentication and data analysis from multiple sources to reduce the risk of GPS spoofing.

Wrap up

From a user perspective, it is important to be vigilant and careful. Using strong access credentials, not clicking on links and following a Zero-Trust approach to cybersecurity can help reduce the risk of spoofing attacks that primarily rely on social engineering.