Top 9 Most Common Spoofing Attacks And How To Prevent From It?

Cyber criminals use the Spoofing attacks to steal users’ confidential data. Scammers use different types of methods to spread malware through malicious links or attachments, to access the victim’s username or password.

What is Spoofing Attacks?

Hackers use various techniques to spoof their identity, covering a spoof email address, phone number, or websites.

Cyber criminals use more advanced tactics like IP spoofing, Domain Name Servers(DNS), or Address Resolution Protocol (ARP).

Spoofing attack can be used to steal personal data, or confidential information, goal of a spoofing attack is to steal the data of victims and damage their reputation.

Hackers sometimes take advantage of common social engineering activities and employees’ fake email addresses, websites, and phone numbers to steal victims’ confidential information.

Different Types of Spoofing Attacks

Email Spoofing :- Email Spoofing is the activity to send malicious email to victim with a false sender address, mostly designed it for phishing attack to steal user’s confidential data or information.

Exploit your computer with malware or just ask for some ransom(some amount of money demanded by hackers ).
Payloads for malicious emails including ransomware, adware, or malicious software that exploit your computer.

The average person isn’t always fooled by a spoofed email address, Imagine receiving a phishing email with a sender field that appears to be a twitter address, but the email’s body is simply written in plain text with no HTML or design of any kind, not even a logo. That should raise some red lights because it’s not something we often get from Twitter.

Spoofed email uses to convincing victims to do immediate activity, This situation reduces the chances of uncertainty and hesitation and convinces the recipient that they are not doing any malicious activity.

Website Or URL Spoofing :- spoofing website or URL is all about to making a malicious website looks like a secure and authentic- branding, logo, colors, layout, domain name all are the same .

A spoofed website looks exactly like authentic website. Attackers use spoofing websites or URL to capture users login details.

Hackers use spoofing website for several reasons, including stealing credit card information, login details, installing malicious software or another malicious activities

IP Address Spoofing:- Hackers use IP(Internet Protocol) Address spoofing to hide their identity, true location of devices like computer and mobile.

IP address spoofing is used to execute Denial-of-service attack to prevent malicious traffic from being destroyed.

GPS Spoofing :- GPS spoofing goal is little bit different it sends a fake GPS signal to receiver which causes all GPS devices in that particular area show wrong location.

GPS spoofing is mostly use by gamer or in warfare.

Hackers can take control of drones, cars, boats, and anything else that uses a navigation system by using GPS spoofing.

Text Messaging spoofing:- Text message spoofing is quite similar to email spoofing. Hackers used spoofed phone number to send malicious text messages or malicious link with text.
Advanced research is used in this type of spoofing attack to determine the text message formats that will attract the user to open and respond.

Hackers use social engineering strategy to gain access of victims detail.

Caller ID Spoofing:- Hackers use caller ID spoofing that uses a phone number that pretends to come from a legitimate source.

It is more likely to answer a call when we see a trusted, known source or specific geographic location.

If in case their call is answered hackers use social engineering strategy to keep victims on the phone.

The hackers may pretend to be a government officer because the caller id looks authentic and real.

ARP Spoofing:- ARP Spoofing is a advanced cyber attack in which hackers connects the MAC (Media Access Control)address to his actual IP(Internet Protocol) address.

This strategy enables the hackers to steal or capture the user’s confidential information e.g. user id, password .

IT can also be used in Man-In-Middle attack or Denial-of-Service attack.

DNS Spoofing :- DNS (Domain Name System) Spoofing is used by hackers to redirect traffic from the authentic IP address to fake IP address.

DNS spoofing attacks encourage users to websites where malware installed through this spoofing technique.

Extension spoofing:- Hackers use extension spoofing to hide executable malware files.

The fact that users have been informed about installing executable is known to fraudsters.

A malicious executable may be hidden by the scammer using a spoof extension, such as “filenametxt.exe”.

The user immediately downloads and installs the file after seeing it in the email as “filename.txt”.

What Causes Spoofing Attacks?

Spoofing attacks happens when hackers exploit loop holes in technology or how it is utilized.

Phishing attack which are scam tactics used to steal personal information from individuals or organizations.

Hackers mislead users into trust that malicious email, phone call, website, text message or other method is genuine and authentic.

How to prevent spoofing attacks?

1. If sensitive information being transmitted from one device to another device then it should always be encrypted with strong encryption key and algorithm.
2. Enable your spam filter, this will filter out all fake emails from hitting your email inbox.
3. Don’t click on such a link or attachment which is coming from an unknown sender, there might be a chance email or link is legitimate.
4. Join a security awareness program that teaches people using adaptable learning models.
5. Confirm that all software, operating system, browser, applications are updated.
6. Always keep on your computer firewall, install anti malware software.
7. You can override Windows’ default setting that hides file extensions by choosing the “View” tab in File Explorer and ticking the box to expose file extensions. At least you’ll be alert enough to spot them and stop those dangerous files from downloading.

Conclusion:- Nowadays Spoofing is a term that is most frequently used to describe cyber-crime. Spoofing attacks occurs each time when a fraudster or online scammer poses as someone or something they are actually not.