What is Email Spoofing?

Continuing with our email security series we’re going to talk about Spoofing today. What is email Spoofing and how can you protect yourself from it?

Email spoofing is whenever somebody sends on behalf of someone else and they spoof you, they make you think that you’re receiving an email from one party when in actuality it’s a different party. This is something that has been around a very long time and a lot of times you can hover over the link of the sender’s email address and you’ll see the actual email address. This has been around for a long time.

One-time full disclosure here, this happened a long time ago. So I think the laws have passed on any kind of punishment that could happen to me. But we were messing around with a guy in the office and he was talking about a whole bunch of money he made and all this. So we sent him an email from the IRS questioning the money that he received right. And we spoofed it. We sent an email and we changed the address basically to IRS gov. And whenever he got the email he freaked out because it was 25 years ago or whatever and he didn’t know what it was and thought, oh gosh, now the IRS knows about all this money I’ve gotten. So it’s that simple.

So how do you protect yourself from that? Well first off you can usually hover over that link and you can see that it didn’t come from the person that it says it came from. Another thing that you can do is it’s more effective because it doesn’t require human intervention to think about more than just beyond ourselves.

A lot of you guys that watch me have employees and there are varying levels of cybersecurity acumen amongst these folks so you want to safeguard them, what I say above their head and you do that with a proper email spam filter with your email properly set up.

We use Barracuda. It’s a cloud-based product and it has an anti-spoofing component to it that checks from the address if you will, where you see it like say Outlook or wherever you’re checking your email and the actual header where the actual email is.

Again, I sent that email from an account that looked like IRS gov but in reality, it was coming from me. So it compares those two on the very simplest it does a lot more things than that but on the very simplest level, there are anti-spoofing products out there that will guard your mailboxes. Not just for you because I talked to a lot of you guys and you guys got it figured out, but for your employees if nothing else. And I just shot a video a second ago and 85% of companies have had some form of security breach over the past twelve months. So we know that these bad actors are successful.

So stay safe out there. If you have questions or concerns about email spoofing, I’m always here to help. I would like to talk to you about a cybersecurity email bundle that you need really to protect your email. It’s your biggest risk for most small to mid-size companies.