Spoofing is impersonation. This may sound like another attack you may have read about in course 3: social engineering, where impersonation is often used. Spoofing is different in the sense that it is not a social attack, but a technical attack. “Technical impersonation” can come in the form of altering information about your device or altering another entity's information. Let's look at more examples of this…

Email Spoofing

Email spoofing is creating a false email address to impersonate. Email spoofing is often used in phishing. If you recall the phishing exercises in course 3, many of those used email spoofing. Emails that used the names of real companies attempted to mislead others.

*Note: it is recommended that you look at course 10 before the following attacks:

IP Spoofing

IP addresses are unique device identifiers on a network. IP spoofing is when an attacker uses a false IP address to impersonate another device that is not their own. Attackers do this by using tools to alter the IP addresses in packet headers . If this information is changed, any computing device that processes the IP address is likely to pass the altered packet along, making it a dangerous attack. IP spoofing is used mainly for identity theft, and can easily fool computer systems if they are not thoroughly checking the packet's checksums (Course 5).

DNS Spoofing

The domain name system (DNS) is a system used to link website names to IP addresses. A DNS server is filled with databases linking names to addresses. DNS spoofing when an alteration is made to these databases, directing users to different websites than what they should be directed to. In many cases, the new website is malicious and meant to steal users' information . DNS spoofing is done through DNS poisoning, which is the process of altering a DNS cache or data to return incorrect responses. The effects of DNS spoofing also come in many other variations, such as interception attacks that redirect users (next article).

Almost any piece of digital information pertaining to identity can be spoofed, these were just the common ones. Other values like phone numbers, locations, etc. can be spoofed as well.