Dr. Wes Leggett Email Spoofing

Email Spoofing
Dr. Wes Leggett

Email spoofing is the forging of email so it appears to originate from someone/somewhere other than the source. An analogy from postal mail would be to use a fake return address on the envelope.

Why spoof? Mainly, it's to hide the real sender and trick the recipient into reading and responding to mail they would otherwise ignore--especially since the mail appears to be from a legitimate person or organization. The email from the spoofed address can also contain an attachment that when opened by the receiver, can activate a virus or place a cookie on their computer.

Viruses commonly use spoofing to propagate themselves. They scan address books on the infected computer, randomly selecting addresses to be used as "from" and "to" fields on outgoing infected email. So, if a virus infects a computer and you are in that computer's email address book, it's possible the virus will send an email that appears to come from you.

Other kinds of spoofing include "phishing", which is email purporting to be from a legitimate business but directs you to a bogus web site. That web site might pretend to be a trusted entity (such as your credit card company) and ask you to enter your credit card number, bank account, national id, or other personal information.

How do spoofers get legitimate email addresses to use? Web Robots, know as webbots, visit websites and cull email addresses from webpages. Other robots, known as websuckers or sitesuckers, download entire websites in violation of copyright laws. These robots are assisting spoofers and spammers. But, not all robots are bad. The major search engines (like Google) send their robots to websites to index webpages and include these pages in their databases. That's how they provide us with so many links to resources that may have information we are seeking.

Thankfully, it is usually not possible to completely hide the originating computer. However, sorting that out often requires looking at the email's full headers, and deciphering full headers can be daunting, unless you're pretty computer savvy.

Email is like most other aspects of life--there are sometimes "fakes" out there, and we must be vigilant in spotting them. The safest action to take is to immediately delete any email where you do not recognize the sender. Those who I communicate with on a regular basis, or those new students that I have every semester, know the email addresses I use to send email that IS REALLY from me!