What is Email Spoofing?

Email spoofing is no more a vague term in the world of cybersecurity. There is no rocket science when it comes to defining “what is email spoofing?”. Just like traditional criminals use forgery as a gateway key to various complex crimes, email spoofing involves the same practice of forging. It is the act forging email sender address to make the email message looks like it has come from a legitimate source. This practice is often used by spammers to trick recipients into opening their spammed emails to respond to their solicitation by taking action.

It is a cyber-criminal activity which involves obtaining of user’s data and financial transactions fraudulently. Individuals are often misguided by emails that appear to have been sent by their trusted senders.

Spoofed emails could be the impersonation of customers, co-workers, managers or of high profiles in the organization. By disguising as among one of these trusted senders, cyber-criminals can request for money transfer or for permission to access the user’s system for data.

Additionally, spoofed emails consist of attachments for installing malware like Trojans or viruses that are purposefully designed to act beyond infecting the recipient’s computer. It could be meant to spread malware in the entire computer network.

Email spoofing scams rely heavily on social engineering as targets can be easily convinced into believing that they have received a legitimate email. Further, it prompts them to respond to the message by opening a malicious attachment or transferring money. Email spoofing is infamous for being used as a weapon in deploying phishing and ransomware attacks.

How Does Email Spoofing work?

It is possible to spoof emails as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) doesn’t provide any mechanism to authenticate email addresses. Scammers mainly alter different email sections to disguise as a legitimate sender. They use the following properties to alter and impersonate:

• From:Name and email address

• Reply-To:Name and email address

• Return-Path:Email address

• Source IP:IP address
  

The above three properties are easily altered by using settings in email software like Google, Outlook, Microsoft, etc. Even one can alter IP addresses but that requires more complex technical knowledge. Email spoofing is used for harvesting personal information with the help of links attached in the mail which further redirects users to a website.

The message might look legitimate to users with the company’s logo and various other aspects that smoothly lure them into giving away their secretive information. Scammers cleverly obtain victim’s information through login form on the website.

As soon as the victims fall for it by filling their personal information, they receive a message stating that the website is down. Meanwhile, scammers’ job is done of collecting recipient’s login information to exploit it for their vicious intent.

KDMARC for Email Spoofing Prevention

Secure your emails by implementing the most reliable cyber-security tool KDMARC by Kratikal. KDMARC is designed and developed by one of the leading cybersecurity companies in India. Highly renowned for ingenious cybersecurity products and services, Kratikal offers one of its best tools to prevent email spoofing. 

KDMARC is a DMARC record generator, which provides advanced technology-based email authentication security. Only this tool offers the best features such as dynamic SPF and dynamic DMARC. With dynamic DMARC, one can easily change policies within less time. Whereas, with dynamic SPF, IP addresses can be blacklisted and whitelisted easily. 

KDMARC greatly excels as a terrific tool for email spoofing prevention. Read our previous article on how to stop email spoofing for more details. 

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• Email: sales@kratikal.com
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