CS406: Information Security

Overview 

• A spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage. 
• Popular Spoofing Techniques 
• Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM):An attack in which an attacker is able to read, insert and modify at will messages between two parties without either party knowing that the link between them has been compromised. The attacker must be able to observe and intercept messages going between the two victims.
• IP address Spoofing : refers to the creation of IP packets with a forged (spoofed) source IP address with the purpose of concealing the identity of the sender or impersonating another computing system.
• URL spoofing: A Spoofed URL describes one website that poses as another.
• Phishing :An attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
• Referrer spoofing:It is the sending of incorrect referrer information along with an HTTP request, sometimes with the aim of gaining unauthorized access to a web site. It can also be used because of privacy concerns, as an alternative to sending no referrer at all. 
• Spoofing of file-sharing Networks: Polluting the file-sharing networks where record labels share files that are mislabeled, distorted or empty to discourage downloading from these sources.
• Caller ID spoofing :This allows callers to lie about their identity, and present false names and numbers, which could of course be used as a tool to defraud or harass.
• E-mail address spoofing:A technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message by changing certain properties of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields.
• Login spoofing : A technique used to obtain a user's password. The user is presented with an ordinary looking login prompt for username and password, which is actually a malicious program, usually called a Trojan horse under the control of the attacker. When the username and password are entered, this information is logged or in some way passed along to the attacker, breaching security.

Countermeasures 

• Be skeptical of e-mails indicating that you need to make changes to your accounts or warnings indicating that accounts will be terminated without you doing some type of activity online.
• Call the legitimate company to find out if this is a fraudulent message.
• Review the address bar to see if the domain name is correct.
• When submitting any type of financial information or credential data, an SSL connection should be set up, which is indicated in the address bar (https://) and a closed-padlock icon in the browser at the bottom-right corner.
• Do not click on an HTML link within an e-mail. Type the URL out manually instead.
• Do not accept e-mail in HTML format.

Source: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fundamentals_of_Information_Systems_Security/Access_Control_Systems#Spoofing/Masquerading
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.