June 11, 2021

A Note On The Different Kinds Of Spoofing Attacks

The term spoofing is no joke in the case of information security. It includes many techniques that are aimed at camouflaging a malicious device or actor as something else. The goal of spoofing is to gain access to the system and get hold of important details, spread malicious software or steal money. There are numerous variants of spoofing attacks and commonly encountered ones are as follows:

ARP Spoofing

ARP spoofing a type of man-in-the-middle attack and cybercriminals flood a network with false Address Resolution Protocol packets to disturb the normal traffic routing process. The logic here is to bind the MAC address of the adversary to the IP address of the default gateway of the target. As a result of ARP spoofing, all traffic will be redirected to the cybercriminal’s computer before reaching the destination. In addition, the attacker will also be able to change or distort the data before it reaches the recipient or may even be able to stop all network communication. Moreover, ARP spoofing can also act as a launchpad for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

IP Spoofing

To do this type of spoofing attack, IP packets with falsified source addresses are sent to the target. IP spoofing can be used to hide the actual online identity of the sender and impersonate another computer located in a different location. You need to be aware of this type of spoofing attack when you plan to buy IP addresses.

IP spoofing can be used to launch a DDoS attack because it is much difficult for digital infrastructure to filter out rogue data packets that appear to come from a different address. Besides, this type of spoofing can be used to get around authentication systems that make use of the IP address of a device as an important identifier. IP spoofing can be performed on both IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses.

MAC Spoofing

Theoretically, all network adapters built into a network-connected device will have a Media Access Control (MAC) address that is unique to the device. However, practically, a clever hack can turn things upside down. An attacker can make use of imperfections in some of the hardware drivers to spoof the Mac address. In this way, the criminal will be able to masquerade his device as a device that is enrolled in the target network, thereby bypassing the traditional access control and restriction mechanisms. Making use of MAC spoofing, cybercriminals can perform frauds like business email compromise, steal valuable information and details, or add malware to the network.