What is Email Spoofing & How to Stop Attackers from Posing as You?

Byaariya goel

A spoofed email sent from a fraudster posing as a vendor is a well-known deception tool in the  online. Corporate networks are frequently targeted by someone posing as an outside vendor or customer trying to trick employees into wiring money to this attacker’s account. In this guide, we’ll explore the different types of identity spoofing, how attackers are using email spoofing to compromise organizations, and what you can do to proactively stop attackers from impersonating your contacts.

Email spoofing tools are used to create fake email headers or to alter existing ones in order to hide the real sender’s address. While these spammers and attackers have full knowledge of how to create such messages, the average computer user usually lacks even a basic understanding of how this form of identity deception works. Email spoofing is the act of impersonating a legitimate sender.

Attackers use this technique to trick recipients into opening harmful prompts or attachments, or answering spoofed requests that request information including passwords, banking details and more. Email spoofing is when the email sender falsifies the return address on a message and sends it to you as if it is coming from someone else. They could even be posing as your IT guy, or your bank. If you don’t have technology to block those spoofed emails, they end up in your inbox, look like real messages, and can be dangerous.

Spoofing is a form of identity deception, similar to phishing that tricks recipients into thinking the message came from a legitimate source. Unlike phishing scams that use spam and malware to commit financial fraud, the perpetrators impersonate a targeted company or organization in order to fool consumers into thinking they are dealing with an authoritative entity. To accomplish this, attackers will often use lookalike domains and domain spoofing in addition to display name spoofing, which is the most common method used in email-based impersonation scams.

E-mail spoofing is where a person or an automated script disguises its identity in an email so that the receiver thinks they are reading a message from someone other than the actual sender. We look closely at what you can do to protect yourself and your employer from this growing threat.

In this post, we’re going to cover how email spoofing works, its effects, protecting against these attacks and more.

How Email Spoofing Works

Email spoofing is one of the most common email-based attack methods, but can still be very successful. By manipulating the ‘From’, ‘Reply-To’, and ‘Return-Path’ email addresses, it can make emails appear more legitimate to consumers and force them to open up their wallets. Email spoofing works because many email systems do not properly authenticate email addresses before relaying them to the intended recipient.

This identity deception is made possible by the fact that SMTP—the Simple Message Transfer Protocol used by email systems to send, receive, or relay outgoing emails—lacks a mechanism for authenticating email addresses. It’s also exacerbated when exploited through popular cloud-based email platforms such as Gmail. The problem is that email spoofing is made easy by a series of loopholes in the way the Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used. By default, it accepts any IP address and email address as a valid (or genuine) target.

Email spoofing is a well-known method of tricking the recipient so they will open an attachment or click on a link. It relies on good content and email delivery from a cloud email account. Cloud accounts are less likely to be detected and blocked than those originating from lookalike domains. Spoofed emails are hard to identify and often closely mimic legitimate email communication coming from financial institutions, government agencies or large businesses.

Effects of Email Spoofing

  • Financial
  • Reputational
  • Security

How To Spot a Spoofed Email

  • Mismatched “From” address and display name
  • Reply-to” Header that doesn’t match the source
  • Message content that’s out of the ordinary

How to Protect Against Spoofing Attacks

To truly protect your organization from spoofing attacks, you need to implement a more comprehensive defence-in-depth strategy that includes implementing email authentication, enforcing S/MIME policies in your desktop and mobile email clients and ensuring that neither outbound nor inbound emails can be spoofed. These are just a few of the features that help protect against the latest spoofing attacks.

Spoofing attacks like these are becoming more common. This one uses a malicious attachment that takes advantage of a recently patched flaw in Microsoft Office to download the Locky ransom ware onto the victim’s computer. In addition, related phishing attacks like these increasingly use innocent third-party businesses’ brands and identities as cover to help trick their targets into opening links or attachments in emails.

Spoofing attacks are increasing, and it is critical that organizations get ahead of these threats. Here’s how to protect against spoofing attacks from the inside and outside.

Inbound Spoofing Attacks

  • Traditional email security controls
  • Identity-based protections
  • Employee training and reporting

Outbound Email Impersonation

There are standard email authentication protocols that can help protect companies and their employees from having their email spoofed in attacks against customers and the general public.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) protocol helps reduce spam by limiting which IP addresses can send e-mail on behalf of a given domain. SPF accomplishes this by publishing a DNS record for the domain that includes a list of approved IP addresses. When receiving e-mail servers encounter an email purportedly sent from the domain, they query the DNS records to verify it was sent from one of the permitted IP addresses listed in the domain’s SPF records.

SPF checking allows you to specify authorized senders for your domain. If an unauthorized IP address attempts to send email on your behalf, the receiving server will be able to identify it as fraudulent.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) uses asymmetric encryption to generate a public and private key pair, with the public key published in a record set up in a domain’s DNS system. It works by affixing a digital signature linked to a specific domain name to each outgoing email message.

A receiving mail server querying the DNS is then able to verify that the message was sent by an authorized email account on behalf of the stated sender. DKIM uses asymmetric encryption to generate a public and private key pair, with the public key published in a record set up in a domain’s DNS. It works by affixing a digital signature linked to a specific domain name to each outgoing email message.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)

DMARC is an email authentication standard that works as a policy layer for SPF and DKIM to help email receiving systems recognize when an email isn’t coming from a company’s approved domains, and provides instructions to email receiving systems with email on how to safely dispose of unauthorized email.

source by :- Ariya Rathi/medium