Say you have a friend that likes to play practical jokes on you. And you receive an email from them that says this:. Notice that the envelope fields are correct, but the From and Reply-To are false.
Cyber criminals can cleverly disguise an email in the same way and custom tailor it for their intended victims. For example, if a criminal wants banking credentials from his or her target, they can do the same thing Dude2 did, but instead of telling Dude1 that he got a raise, they can falsely represent themselves within the email as a trusted bank and direct the recipient to go to a fraudulent website.
From there, the end goal is usually the same, extracting money from the victim. Check out our Email Security Strategy Guide to find out. 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:. If you got an email from yourself with ransom threats, the first step is to stop and collect yourself.
This will clear out whether the email came from your own account. If the email truly came from your own inbox, you need to act fast and take all precautions to protect your email and your identity. Aside from the obvious red flags, you only need to look at the full email header. It contains all the critical components of every email: From , To , Date and Subject. Also, there will be metadata on how the email was routed to you and where it came from. For other services that you may be using, you can check this list.
I had to find it in the spam folder. Suppose I would have picked a lower-profile domain of a lesser-known company with fewer methods to verify. Well, there is still a lot that you can check. This is enough to call out the email as spoofed. Some poorly maintained domains do not keep their SPF records up to date, failing validation.
This is a clear example of email spoofing. Several years ago, all Seagate employees received emails impersonating their CEO requesting their W-2 forms. Most employees believed that it was a genuine internal business email and, unbeknownst to them, leaked their annual wages.
An unidentified worker received a letter from the CEO. Since the used email seemed legitimate enough, the person complied with the request. However, a hacked email account means that the attacker managed to gain full access to your email account. The emails that the hacker sends will genuinely come from your mailbox. However, in the case of spoofing, your account remains untouched.
Usually, the aim of email spoofing is to make a person trust the email enough to open its files or send private data to the sender. There are three major types of email spoofing: spoofing via display name, spoofing via legitimate domains, and spoofing via lookalike domains.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked. If you purchase via links on our site, we may receive affiliate commissions. Use a secure email provider Choose a secure email service provider. ProtonMail is widely known and free to use. Register for the service to get your personal mailbox. Write encrypted emails even to non-ProtonMail recipients. It has an option to report phishing emails that you receive, once they become flagged, it'll be easier to avoid such scams for other users.
Visit ProtonMail What is email spoofing? Reasons for email spoofing The reasons for email spoofing are quite straightforward. This method looks more primitive than ghost spoofing, but some scammers prefer it for several reasons.
Second, ghost spoofing is technically easier to block with spam filters: it is enough to consign to the spam folder emails where the displayed sender name contains the email address. It is not generally feasible to block all incoming emails sent from addresses with the same names as colleagues and contractors.
More sophisticated attacks use specially registered domains, similar to the domain of the target organization. But it also complicates the task of recognizing a fake. A lookalike domain is a domain name that looks similar to that of the organization being spoofed, but with a couple of alterations.
We discussed such domains in detail in our article Lookalike domains and how to outfox them. For example, the email in the screenshot below came from the domain deutschepots. If you follow the link in such an email and try to pay for delivery of a parcel, you will not only lose 3 euros, but also hand your card details to the fraudsters. Example of a message from a lookalike domain. However, with the right level of vigilance, it is possible to spot misspelled domains. But in other cases, simple attentiveness is no longer sufficient.
Unicode spoofing is a type of spoofing in which an ASCII character in the domain name is replaced with a physically similar character from the Unicode set. Understanding this technique requires knowledge of how domains that use non-Latin characters for example, Cyrillic or umlauts are encoded.
At the same time, many browsers and mail clients display the Unicode version of the domain. For example, this Russian domain:. Since this technology provides for partial encoding individual characters are encoded, not the whole string , the domain can contain both ASCII and Unicode characters, which cybercriminals actively utilize. In the screenshot above, we see a message supposedly sent from the domain apple.
It looks legitimate, and the email passed mail authentication. The email design is unusual, but since the average user rarely receives messages about blocking, there is little by way of comparison. If an unsuspecting user clicks the link, they are taken to a fake site that asks for their account details.
A look at the message headers which can be done in most mail clients for PC and web versions of mail services shows a completely different picture:. The fact is that the apple. It should be noted that some mail clients warn the user about non-standard characters used in the domain name, or even display Punycode in the From header.
However, such protection mechanisms are not universal, which plays into the hands of fraudsters. There are various ways to convince the recipient of an email that it came from a trusted sender. Some of them seem primitive, yet they enable cybercriminals to successfully bypass mail authentication. At the same time, the technique of spoofing is used to carry out various types of attacks, from standard phishing to advanced BEC. They, in turn, can be just one step in a more sophisticated targeted attack.
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