Spoofing Software

Spoofing is actually pretending to be somebody else, pretending to have a different identity. You know, in the real life we have identities and we know who we are and our identities can be seen on our identity cards. But even these can be forged and we can pretend being who we are not. So you can imagine that in the virtual world it is even easier to do this. On the internet you don't have an actual identity as a person, but your computer does - it has an IP or internet protocol , a number that is unique for every single computer connected to the internet.

You get this IP in order to have an evidence of your activity on the internet : to see what web sites you visited or any other activities you performed. They are usually very useful for the network administrator or ... for the police officers who want to discover exactly the computer that was used in certain illegal activities like internet frauds or cracking data bases or security systems or similar activities. That is precisely why the people doing these activities want to cover their tracks and try to change their computers' identities, so they use a spoofing software, that is a software that is able to change their IP, by randomly generating new IPs or by simply replacing the existing one with someone else's. This way the bad guy can't be caught.



The most common use of the spoofing software is email spoofing. It falls into the spam category and is treated as malware because usually the emails sent when using this spoofing software have a virus or a trojan attached and steal the email address book of the person receiving the spoofed email message. So a randomly created email address sends hundreds of emails messages to different email addresses it was fishing from the internet pages. Th message has a virus or worm attached and, as soon as the email is opened it infiltrates the address book and gets all the emails addresses there, sending them the virus, too. But how do they get opened ? They look like they are really replies to a former email message that the person holding that email account has sent before. That's email spooing .



Of course this spoofing thing, changing your identity , was used first on the telephones in order not to identify the caller ID , so they displayed a different number, either by using a Skype account that allows you to make phone calls or by using a spoofing software that generates random phone numbers or even SMS that looks like it was sent from a different device. There's no use calling back or sending replies in the case of emails because those identities are already gone, so you are getting nowhere. The only sane thing to do is be careful what email messages you open and make sure you have a really strong antivirus protecting your computer. It won't work in the case when an infected message is sent using an email addredd that you know and that was "spoofed" from your friend's address book, but at least you will be noticed if a worm or virus is trying to reach your computer.