Intro
Email spoofing is the OG of cyber attacks. It’s been around since the 1970s and over 3.1 billion domain spoofing emails are sent per day. It’s not looking to stop anytime soon with scammers having made around $26 billion since 2016. So the next time you get that Microsoft email, don’t immediately click on the link inside.
Let’s take a look at spoofing and how you can defend your employees and your organization from it.
What is email spoofing?
Email spoofing is a cybercrime where the scammer imitates a trusted co-worker, company or entity’s email, in order to trick people out of sensitive information or money.
Usually, people don’t check all the details of the email and they fall victim to fraudulent attacks that come from a fake sender’s address. Then, when the user clicks on a malicious link, it opens malware, sends sensitive data, or even transfers personal or corporate funds.
There’s a difference between email spoofing and phishing attacks:
- The goal of spoofing is to impersonate someone’s identity, while the goal of phishing is to steal information
- However, attackers may use both spoofing and phishing as part of the same attack. A spoofed email address can make a phishing attack more believable.
- Spoofing by itself is not fraudulent (imitates number or email instead of stealing it)
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the ways you can defend your employees and your organization from email spoofing attacks in the future.
How you can defend your organization and your employees from email spoofing
There are a couple of things that you can do to prevent your organization and employees from falling victim to email spoofing:
Checking emails
The employees should check the email header of every email they receive to see if they’re from a legitimate source and the dates/names match up. Most of the time, spoofing emails have spelling “errors” such as M1ke instead of Mike so check the content thoroughly. On top of that, the spoofing emails rely on urgency bias to bypass our perceptions of any red flag so they will pose as being “very urgent” and require immediate attention from the employee receiving themIf it’s for the transfer of any kind of sensitive data or funds, the employee should double-check with the sender first. And lastly, educate your employees to avoid clicking on any suspicious links or downloading any attachments. This is how scammers infiltrate your network.
Running cyber crime simulations
In general, you should have simulations to test the preparation level of your employees for a cyber attack. With regular simulations, you’ll better prepare your employees to be wary of cyber attacks and not fall victim to email spoofing or phishing attacks. Don’t think that email spoofing can’t happen in your organization; even a city treasurer was tricked into wiring $100,000 to a fraudster.
The technical process for defence
Using email authentication protocols such as Implement Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) will help you automatically reject emails that fail validation and they’ll be automatically directed to your spam box. Using an email gateway or anti-malware can filter messages can help protect your employees, detecting email spoofing before they reach your employees’ inboxes.
Using an Intranet
When you use an intranet, you have a centralized location where your employees can learn about the latest spoofing or phishing scams as well as a place to report any scams they have received in their inbox. Additionally, that’s a place where your employees can check the information they receive to see if they’re true or just another attempt at scamming.
The more defenses you have against email spoofing, the better your cybersecurity will be. So stack the odds in your favor by implementing as many cybersecurity protocols and measures as you can, starting with a centralized repository of information that serves as a single source of truth and communication— an intranet.
Conclusion
Email spoofing has been around for more than 50 years and it’s not going anywhere. It’s up to businesses to learn how to best defend themselves against these attacks. One of the ways you can do so is using your intranet as a single source of truth and mitigate the risk presented by fragmented information sources. You can also check out our webinar on that exact topic here.
