What is Spoofing and How to Protect From Spoofing?

What is spoofing?

The principle of deception is as old as crime itself. Fraudsters and crooks have always played double games in order to deceive people and thus gain illegal booty. Fraud has always been one of the main pillars of criminal activity and has now spread to the virtual world on a large scale.

Spoofing is a broad term used to describe activities in which cyber criminals “disguise” themselves as trusted users or devices in order to induce users to take actions that will benefit the hacker and cause harm to the user.

Mail spoofing

Mail spoofing is one of the most widespread attacks and is often aimed at revealing personal information or conducting financial transactions. The emails used to start these attacks appear to come from trustworthy senders such as customers, colleagues, or superiors. In reality, however, they come from cybercriminals who consciously camouflage themselves in order to gain your trust and support and thus induce you to take certain actions. For example, this could involve a money transfer or permission to access a system.

In addition, spoofed emails sometimes contain attachments that, when opened, install malware such as Trojans or viruses. In many cases, the malware is designed not only to infect your computer but also to spread throughout your network.

This aspect of spoofing is heavily based on so-called social engineering, i.e. the ability to convince a user of the legitimacy of a certain process and to encourage him to act. This could be opening an attachment, transferring money, etc.

IP spoofing

While scammers focus on individual users for mail spoofing, IP spoofing is primarily targeted at networks.

With IP spoofing, an attacker tries to gain unauthorized access to a system by sending messages from a forged or “spoofed” IP address. The aim is to create the impression that the message comes from a trustworthy source, such as an address on your own internal computer network.

Cybercriminals do this by using the IP address of a legitimate host and modifying the packet headers sent from their own system so that they appear to be coming from the appropriate trusted computer.

An attacker known as a "spoofer" who gains control of a browser can essentially direct visitors from a legitimate website to a similar-looking, deceptive website. This website is then used to steal visitors' personal and account information. This method is known as website spoofing.

Countermeasures against spoofing

As with most aspects of defending against cybercrime, awareness-raising is the cornerstone of self-protection. Trust is known to be good, but blind trust - especially in the virtual world - is seldom good and often dangerous.

If you have any doubts about the legality of an email, pick up the phone, and personally verify that the information is correct and that it actually came from the specified sender.

When visiting a website, pay attention to how the website looks and acts.

Should anything appear suspicious to you, please leave the website without providing any personal information. If you really need to communicate with the company in question, contact them directly.

Powerful total security software can protect you from rogue websites and eliminate malware as soon as it tries to infiltrate your system.