Have you ever been cheated on? You probably have, even if you don’t realize it, because the term “spoofing” refers to any attempt by a threat actor to pretend they are someone or something else.
So if you’ve ever received an email that claimed to be from your ISP but wasn’t, or visited a website that looked legitimate but wasn’t, you were scammed. But it’s more complicated than that, and there are different types of spoofing attacks. Here are the four most common.
1. Email Spoofing
Let’s say you receive an email claiming to be from your bank, and stating that you need to log in to your online banking account and change your password. The subject line reads “Reset your password immediately” and the email looks completely legitimate and uses the same color scheme as your bank as well as the logo.
Maybe you forgot to check the address the message came from, or fear your bank account will be compromised unless you change your password, so you click the link. At this point, it’s probably already too late. The cyber criminal who targeted you now has access to your banking information and can do with it whatever they want.
Email spoofing works in a similar way, but the good news is that there are ways to prevent it.
First of all, never share your email address on social media. Don’t subscribe to strange newsletters or sign up on questionable platforms. And avoid filling out registration forms on shady websites – that’s mainly how threat actors obtain emails.
Whenever you receive an email, check the address it came from, quickly analyze the text for spelling and grammar mistakes, and check whether a link is safe before clicking it. It won’t take more than a few moments of your time, but can save you a lot of trouble.
2. Website Spoofing
Website spoofing, or domain spoofing, occurs when a threat actor creates a fraudulent website to mimic a well-known brand or organization.
For example, let’s say you want to check out the latest sports news on espn(dot)com, but you accidentally type “espm(dot)com” into the address bar. The website may look exactly like ESPN, and it actually features the latest sports news with photos and videos from last Sunday’s football game. Maybe something looks wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You continue browsing the site.
In the above scenario (a hypothetical example, “espm” is not actually a registered domain, at the time of writing), you would be a victim of what is called website spoofing. The cyber criminals behind the website can deploy all kinds of malware on your device, steal your data, and just generally put your privacy and security at risk in a variety of ways.
This goes to show how important it is to have anti-malware installed on your device. Thanks to a feature called real-time protection, a good antivirus will prevent a fake website from loading and protect you from attacks. Still, whenever a website looks suspicious or an offer looks too good to be true, make sure you double-check that you’re in the right place.
3. IP Spoofing
An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a series of numbers that identifies your device on the Internet, making it unique among millions of other devices online. The term IP spoofing, meanwhile, refers to a technique through which cyber criminals steal and misuse IP addresses.
To understand how IP spoofing works, you first need to know how Internet traffic travels from one online location to another. In simple terms, Internet traffic travels in so-called packets or units of data, which contain information about the sender of the traffic.
To execute an IP spoofing attack, a cybercriminal modifies the originating IP address of a packet. In other words, they make it appear as though traffic is coming from a legitimate and trusted source when it is not, thus creating an opening to deploy malware, or hack into communications between a target and another subject. Are.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to prevent IP spoofing attacks. Obviously having strong anti-malware protection is essential in any case, but you can also use a VPN that encrypts your traffic, and make sure you only visit secure websites that use HTTPS connections. are, as opposed to using HTTP.
4. DNS Spoofing
When you want to visit MUO, you type “makeuseof.com” into the address bar instead of typing the site’s IP address. Imagine having to remember a bunch of random numbers instead of domain names—doesn’t it sound like a nightmare? The main reason for not doing this is the Domain Name System (DNS). So DNS basically turns domain names into IP addresses.
How does DNS Spoofing work? In a DNS spoofing attack, a threat actor replaces the real IP address of a domain with a fake one. If a cybercriminal launches this type of attack against MUO, then in the address bar “makeuseof.