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What is email spoofing?

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Ariya Rathi

Email spoofing is the act of sending emails with a forged sender address. It tricks the recipient into thinking that someone they know or trust sent them the email. Usually, it’s a tool of a phishing attack, designed to take over your online accounts, send malware, or steal funds. Spoofed email messages are easy to make and easy to detect. However, more malicious and targeted varieties can cause significant problems and pose a huge security threat.

 

Reasons for email spoofing

 

The reasons for email spoofing are quite straightforward. Usually, the criminal has something malicious in mind, like stealing the private data of a company or even using the information to conduct phishing operations. Basically, he wants to hide his identity by sending emails with the recipient's email address as the Sender. Email spoofing is when someone alters the "From" portion of an email in order to disguise the true origin of the message. Many companies and individuals use email spoofing or a phishing scheme in order to steal personal data, credit card information, and anything else related to online financial transactions.

Email spoofing provides a multitude of motives. Most commonly, it can be used to falsify the identity of the sender because the victim might not want to deal with a specific person or business, but needs to talk to them. This is often why spammers use email spoofing because it makes the spam look like it came from a known sender, but in reality it is spam.

 

Here are the most common reasons behind this malicious activity:

 

  • Almost universally, email spoofing is a gateway for phishing. Pretending to be someone the recipient knows is a tactic to get the person to click on malicious links or provide sensitive information.

 

  • Identity theft. Pretending to be someone else can help a criminal gather more data on the victim (e.g. by asking for confidential information from financial or medical institutions).

 

  • Avoiding spam filters. Frequent switching between email addresses can help spammers avoid being blacklisted.
  • Sometimes, a fake email address is used to simply hide the sender’s true identity.

Email spoofing can be incredibly dangerous, subject to numerous email scams which are designed to fool the recipients into sending money or personal information. Essentially, this occurs when a scammer takes the information of someone else’s email account and then sends out messages that appear to be coming from that person. While experts have warned for years that this is an easy way for scammers to gain money, these vulnerabilities are still being exploited by fraudsters. Spoofing is not a new hacking technique, but it’s been used more frequently in recent years to trick people into giving up passwords and sensitive data. Email spoofing will require companies that want to prevent against the practice to put additional effort toward it using security controls.

How to stop email spoofing?

That's why, Mailtrust offers a patented approach to solving this problem by automatically verifying the integrity of every message received by checking what domain the email came from. Another solution, DMARC, offers an additional layer of security for companies by giving them additional control over how their domains are contacted through email. Both are important pieces to stopping email spoofing. In this article, I will show you two different methods to protect from email spoofing. The "From:" field in an email can be modified by hackers or spammers to display a spoofed email address.

In the examples below, you will see that I have changed the legitimate user's address to a domain name that doesn't exist. The good news is there are two different technologies available to prevent email spoofing: SPF records and DMARC Setup Guides. But it is possible to prevent others from using your email address to send emails without your permission. There are two methods that you can use to prevent this.

There are some additional countermeasures developed to counter email spoofing. Still, the success rate will depend entirely on whether your email service provider implemented them.

Most trusted email providers use additional checks:

  • Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
  • DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
  • Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)
  • Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME).

These tools work automatically, and when used effectively, they immediately disregard spoofed messages as spam.

As an ordinary user, you can stop email spoofing by choosing a secure email provider and practicing good cybersecurity hygiene:

  • Use throwaway accounts when registering in sites. That way, your private email address won't appear in shady lists used for sending spoofed email messages in bulk.

 

  • Make sure that your email password is strong and is complex enough. That way, it will be harder for cybercriminals to get into your account and send misleading messages to your contacts.

 

  • Inspect the email headers, especially when someone asks to click on a link. Spoofed emails made by talented attackers can be identical to the genuine ones. They can seem indistinguishable even if you're a long-time user.

 

How to protect yourself from email spoofing?

 

If you received a spoofed email from yourself, check your header information. This will display the sender’s email address, as well as the originating IP address where the email was sent from. The “Received” line can also reveal if an email has been forwarded or previously sent with a different, non-spoofed sender address. You shouldn’t be the only one to open an email, especially if it’s about something serious like ransom. It’s good to keep in mind that if you received an email with ransom threats, there is no need to panic. Instead, move forward cautiously by investigating the header and checking for the IP addresses, SPF, DMARC, DKIM validations etc. Email spoofing is one of the most popular methods of technical cyber-crime. One cannot ignore the importance of having a solid email security protection that is able to detect and prevent email spoofing. SPF, DKIM, DMARC are the only email authentication features currently available.

They help to make sure that even if an attacker manages to capture your email account along with its content, he or she will not be able to send spoofed emails without being caught. Spoofing is a type of phishing attack where a hacker assumes a false identity. Spoofing attacks can be done in a few different ways. One is to falsify the source address in an email that appears to have been sent from someone, or something, else. In another example, a hacker might use a forged sender email address in combination with the name of a person in the from line to trick you into thinking they are someone they are not–such as someone from your bank.

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Ariya Rathi
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