Did you know that more than 3 billion spoofed emails are sent each day? Businesses of all sizes and industries may become a target for spoofing. Even though spoofers prefer targeting famous organizations, small businesses are not out of their reach or scope of interest either.
Spoofing comes with a wide range of negative side effects, including financial harm, reputational damage, and more. When you accurately generate a DKIM record, use strong DMARC policies, and regularly clear your DNS cache, the likelihood of spoofing and the success thereof are minimized.
Key takeaways
- Email spoofing is the most common phishing method.
- It involves sending email messages with a fake sender address on behalf of someone you trust.
- Common consequences of email spoofing include financial losses and reputational damage.
- Leveraging email authentication, flushing your DNS caches, choosing a reputable DNS provider, and DNS filtering can help you prevent spoofing.
- Educating your team is also equally important for spoofing detection and prevention.
But What Exactly Is Email Spoofing?
Email is a popular method of communication across businesses globally. This makes it a popular target for cybercrimes. This is because hackers can impersonate trusted domains to gain access to valuable, sensitive data and carry out a range of malicious activities. This makes email spoofing the most common of all phishing methods.
Another contributing factor is the intrinsic gaps in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SMTP itself does not have a mechanism in place to check and authenticate senders. As a result, when a given mail server has an open SMTP port, hackers can target and exploit it with nothing stopping them on the way.
Spoofing involves luring the victims into believing that the email is from the actual trusted official domain. However, the official domain has been impersonated by attackers, so it’s no longer the official owner who’s communicating with you.
Spoofed emails are likely to contain malware, malicious links to fake websites, or anything else that will put you, your team, or any of your stakeholders at risk.
Common Email Spoofing Methods
Let’s explore some common methods of email spoofing.
1. Legitimate-Looking But Fake Emails
When using this method, the spoofers send you an email that looks so similar to the one you usually send to your clients. The contents, the formatting, and the voice may feel the same. It might contain some undertones of FOMO and urgency here and there, so that the recipient is prompted to take immediate action. Common threat examples include:
- Account suspension (so you click on a link to prevent it)
- Alert of someone trying to access your account (so that you click a link to change your password)
- Request to make a payment (so you either send them the funds yourself or enter the credentials that they can use to access your account)
- Many other creative ways to push you to act immediately and not think twice. By the time you get time to think, they have already obtained what they wanted.
2. High-Level Personnel Impersonation
Often, spoofers impersonate high-level personnel. This is because people working in high-level positions in a company are more likely to be trusted and to engage in communication with. Since the recipients think the email is from someone in authority, they take the information and the prompts without a grain of salt.
And this is how credit card information, company secrets, key documents, and other sensitive data are shared without giving it a second thought. The victims may feel safe to share both personal and work-related data. In both cases, the consequences may be quite unwanted.
Common Email Spoofing Consequences
The extent of the consequences email spoofing can have is quite unpredictable. But here are some common ones:
Reputational Damage
Customers are less likely to trust and deal with a business if it’s associated with a phishing incident. Of course, who would like their personal or professional information to be stolen by a group of people with malicious intent?
Financial Losses
Some forms of spoofing may directly lead to financial losses, wherein the hackers immediately transfer the funds to their bank or PayPal account. In other cases, the financial impact may be more indirect. For example, the spoofing may result in reputational damage, which might in turn push away current and potential customers. If this happens, the financial losses are quite likely to follow.
Reduced ROI
If a domain is associated with spoofing, it’s likely to lose trust in the eyes of both clients and email service providers. This may lead to a low email deliverability rate, where your emails no longer reach the intended recipient and instead fall into the spam folder. This will ruin your marketing campaigns and significantly reduce your ROI.
Methods to Protect Your Domain from Spoofing
Here are several useful tips you can follow to prevent spoofing and protect your domain.
Leverage Email Authentication.
Email authentication can help you enhance the security of your email domain and your recipients, while also boosting deliverability.
SPF: Sender Policy Framework
SPF is a standard email authentication protocol. It enables the receiving servers to check and confirm whether the IP address is authorized to send emails from that domain. As a result, it allows servers to tell apart those with authorized addresses from unauthorized, potentially malicious IPs. It makes it much easier to detect and prevent spoofing before an email reaches your inbox. Therefore, always check SPF so that it can check your senders!
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) helps verify that an email hasn’t been tampered with during transmission. By authenticating outgoing messages with a unique DKIM signature, organizations can protect their domains from spoofing attempts. Setting up DKIM involves creating a public DKIM key and adding it to your domain’s DNS records. When recipient servers receive an email, they use this public key to validate the DKIM signature and confirm the message’s authenticity.
DMARC: Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance
DMARC is a popular email authentication protocol that builds on SPF and DKIM. It tells the receiving servers what to do with the emails that do not pass SPF or DKIM authentication. DMARC also provides comprehensive reporting, so that you have an overview of your email traffic and can solve issues in real time.
If you haven’t yet configured DMARC or have any doubts, companies like PowerDMARC can help. For example, you can use their free DMARC record checker to see how accurate and up-to-date your DMARC record is.
DNSSEC
It would also be useful to activate DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) to add cryptographic signatures to your DNS records. This helps verify their authenticity and integrity. The result is that it will now be much harder for spoofers to alter or forge DNS responses.
Routinely Flush DNS Caches.
Regularly flush DNS caches on servers, routers, and user devices. This will help prevent the use of potentially compromised or malicious cached DNS records.
Choose Trusted DNS Providers.
Set your systems to use DNS servers from well-known and reliable providers. This simple yet important choice can help reduce the likelihood of DNS tampering.
Implement DNS Filtering and Firewall Policies.
Utilize DNS filtering tools or configure firewall rules to restrict access to domains that are known to be malicious or spoofed.
Educate Your Team.
A staff that has the necessary know-how on how to detect and respond to spoofing will most likely not fall victim to it. Investing in the education and training of your staff will help you save on investing in spoofing mitigation.
Summing Up
Preventing spoofing attacks is much easier than many people think. It just requires a combination of the right technologies and strategies, such as choosing trusted DNS providers or leveraging email authentication. If you do everything right, you can substantially reduce spoofing and significantly enhance your and others’ security online.