If the user is successfully tricked and types in credentials, the attacker now has credentials to authenticate into the targeted user’s PayPal account, potentially stealing money from the user. The message tells the user that their account will be suspended if they don’t click a link, authenticate into the site and change the account’s password. Exploiting that trust, the attacker asks the recipient to divulge information or take some other action.Īs an example of email spoofing, an attacker might create an email that looks like it comes from PayPal. The goal of email spoofing is to trick users into believing the email is from someone they know or can trust-in most cases, a colleague, vendor or brand.

Still, users can review email headers packaged with every message to determine whether the sender address is forged. Unfortunately, not every email service has security protocols in place. Recipient servers and antimalware software can help detect and filter spoofed messages. Outgoing messages are assigned a sender address by the client application outgoing email servers have no way to tell whether the sender address is legitimate or spoofed. So they’ll click malicious links, open malware attachments, send sensitive data and even wire corporate funds.Įmail spoofing is possible due to the way email systems are designed. If it’s a name they recognize, they’re more likely to trust it. Unless they inspect the header more closely, users see the forged sender in a message. In spoofing attacks, the sender forges email headers so that client software displays the fraudulent sender address, which most users take at face value.

Email spoofing is a technique used in spam and phishing attacks to trick users into thinking a message came from a person or entity they either know or can trust.

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