Spoofing is a type of cybercriminal activity where someone or something forges the sender's information and pretends to be a legitimate source, business, colleague, or other trusted contact for the purpose of gaining access to personal information, acquiring money, spreading malware, or stealing data.
The most common type of spoofing is done through email. Similar to phishing scams, spoofing emails can be hard to detect. Typically, a false sense of urgency is conveyed in the way spoofing attacks are written, which often is the reason why end users react to them.
The telltale signs of a spoofing email include:
The best defense against email spoofing is a layered approach to your email security that includes a robust defense against phishing, spoofing, business email compromise, and other cyber threats. You will want functionality that lets you find, block, and remediate threats to inbound and outbound email.
Also look for:
Text message spoofing, also known as "smishing" (sms text message + phishing), is similar to email spoofing. It occurs when a text message pretends to be from a legitimate source, such as Amazon or your financial institution. The message often contains a malicious link. The intent is to acquire your personal information.
Caller ID spoofing happens when phone scammers change their phone number and caller ID name to conceal their true identities.
URL spoofing occurs when hackers create a fake domain and website in order to obtain personal information from victims or infect a user's network with ransomware.
IP address spoofing can occur on a network when an IP address is intentionally misrepresented as the source IP address in an IP packet. The purpose is to impersonate another computing system.
DNS spoofing is often referred to as a "cache poisoning" attack. A DNS cache poisoning attack locates and then exploits vulnerabilities that exist in the DNS to draw organic traffic away from a legitimate server and toward a fake one.