www.akinyi-princess.de
I just received an email apparently coming from myself! Of course I was curious and opened it – et voila (sorry I don't have the French bits and pieces to spell this correctly) – with the dearest of husbands and four children between us, I was being offered Viagra. Laughing, I crawled down and clicked the sender’s unsubscribe. Whoosh! I landed on a Canadian website selling me even more dozens of different potency pills! You're up, you don't quit, eh.
I’ve deleted everything, but have I really escaped this net, medium fish that I am? I’ve activated my Spam terminator to sweep my PC three times, but am I really safe? After all, it was this same software supposed to see to it that none of these good fellas get to me and my precious files, who failed to notice the spoofing in the first place – and set me up like a sitting duck. And Viagra seems to be a bestseller.
Definition according to Toney Bradley, CISSP-ISSAP: Email spoofing is the act of forging the header information on an email so that it appears to have originated from somewhere other than its true source. The protocol used for email, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), does not have any authentication to verify the source. By changing the header information, someone can make an email appear to come from whomever they choose. Miscreants can even copy the targeted organization's logo and formatting, to give the email an authentic look and feel.
Email spoofing is used by virus authors. By propagating a virus with a spoofed email source, it is more difficult for users who receive the virus to track its source to stop the virus.
Email spoofing is also used by distributors of spam to hide their identity. In March 2009, About.com's daily newsletter was the victim of a high volume of spoofed email from spammers attempting to sell Viagra. Because the email contained About.com's logo and address, some recipients believed it actually originated from About.com.
Well, I hope my terminator did the deed. So I say: stay tuned and beware of the satyr Apky the Upright!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment