What is Spoofing?

Spoofing refers to the impersonation of a legitimate source of information by an imposter. Spoofing usually occurs for the purpose of fraudulent or illegal activity and appears most frequently as an email message that appears to be from a known source, but is actually from an imposter.

The message includes links to websites that are designed to capture the information you might enter into a form and then used for crimes such as identity theft. There are other types of spoofing besides email messages that I'll discuss as well, but email is so common it will help to start with email spoofing so you can learn how to recognize a spoof when you see it.

Spoofing, by the way, is a word which once meant copying a work of art for satirical purposes,

Email spoofing

If you're like most people, you've probably received an email from a recognizable name of a friend or acquaintance, only to discover upon opening it, that it was from someone else entirely. This technique is popular with spammers because of many people no longer open emails from people or addresses they don't recognize.

An email message can be a spoof if the name in the FROM text displays as a person or email address you might recognize. In fact, the mail message may be from an imposter. Email FROM spoofing is becoming harder with some newer technologies introduced in 2012 that are being used by many email services on the Internet. It's still possible for someone to create an email with a FROM name that may be an imposter, but is it dangerous to open the email message?

Reading a spoofed email isn't a problem, it's just that since you think the email is from someone you know, you're more likely to trust any links to web pages and file attachments with requests to open them that create problems. Don't click on the links if you have any doubts, just enter the website that's referred to in the email directly in your web browser and go to the page. Email spoofing is often combined with these fraudulent web links in a technique called phishing.

Emails all have a set of information included as part of the message called the “header.” The header contains information about the email message that is not usually displayed by your email software and the information is used by the email software to identify your email account, the sender, and other technical information that's necessary for an email to function properly.

Often, but not always the real sender of the email can be identified by looking at the header information but it's not a necessity to check every email to determine the true source. If you're interested, however, each email program is a little different so viewing the header of an email is difficult to explain here. I recommend doing a search to find instructions for “how to find the header…” and enter your specific email software application in the search, and you'll find some technical articles and recommendations.

If in doubt, send an email to your contact's email address and see if they sent the email to you or not. In some cases, their email account might have been compromised or hacked.

Other types of spoofing

Each communication technology has its forms of spoofing. For example, telephone communication spoofing utilizes caller ID to gain access using a false identity. In caller ID spoofing, the caller-ID is falsified and displays on your phone as another name. The FCC has strict rules about caller ID spoofing and violators can be fined up to $10,000 for each violation. They also require telemarketers to transmit or display their telephone numbers and provide a number people can call to request no further calls from them.

GPS spoofing utilizes counterfeit GPS signals that behave like normal ones or a technique of rebroadcasting genuine signals that were broadcast at a different time or in a different place. GPS spoofing can trick the GPS receiver into believing that the transmitted data came from a legitimate location.

Social media might seem like an area on the Internet where spoofing would be more prevalent, but the social media sites all have the ability to shut down a user's account very quickly. As a result, while spoofing occurs on social media, any reports of spoofing or fraud are quickly removed.

Internet spoofing has several varieties, including Internet Protocol address (the 198.1.1.1 types of numbers for IP addresses) in which someone forges the header with a different IP address, so it appears that the data was sent by a different entity. The goals of this kind of spoofing are often to flood sites with so much traffic that they crash or to bypass network security measures that rely on IP address authentication.

Legitimate spoofing

However, not all spoofing is done for nefarious purposes. There are cases in which it can be used legitimately. Network management techniques use a form of spoofing to speed network traffic and reduce congestion. This type of spoofing usually is done on private networks by the information technology staff who manages the network. In this case, it's for the purpose of improving network performance, not a fraud.

To my way of thinking

Spoofing is never going away as long as there are potential opportunities for people to commit fraud. Instead of someone misrepresenting themselves in person for gain, it's just over the Internet now.

Here's the advice from the Internet Crime Center of the FBI on how to deal with a suspicious email:

• Be suspicious of any unsolicited email requesting personal information.
• Avoid filling out forms in email messages that ask for personal information.
• Always compare the link in the email to the link that you are directed to.
• Log on to the official website, instead of "linking" to it from an unsolicited email.
• Contact the actual business that supposedly sent the email to verify if the email is genuine.

Here's some additional resources on the web:

Carnegie-Mellon University article on spoofing

Federal Trade Commission webpage on spoofing.

Google - how to view email headers.

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