What is spoofing? Easily explained

Spoofing has become more common with the spread of the Internet, and includes many methods used by hackers and other Internet criminals to gain access to a PC, network, or certain data. You can find out exactly what spoofing is and how you can protect yourself from spoofing in this practical tip.

Spoofing - what is it?

• "Spoofing" is an English term and means something like "fake", "deceive", trick ".
• In IT, spoofing refers to the intrusion into computers or networks by pretending a trustworthy identity.
• Most of the time, spoof e-mails fake the sender IP, name or address in such a way that a recipient considers them to be trustworthy.
• The goals of spoofing are in particular personal data using phishing or pharming. You can find out more about phishing and pharming in special practical tips.
• Anti-virus software manufacturers in particular also refer to phishing as brand spoofing.
• If a computer program repeatedly generates new spoofing emails or repeatedly directs the user to spoofing URLs, i.e. fake websites, this is known as a spoofing attack.
• Another goal of spoofing can be to install malware like Keylogger on your system.
• How a virus works and a horror cabinet of the worst viruses are topics of special practical tips.

How to deal with spoofing

In order to detect and prevent spoofing attacks, or to help yourself as a victim of spoofing, we have a collection of practical tips for you:

• A firewall offers rudimentary protection against spoofing. We'll show you how to activate the Windows 8 firewall.
• An indication of spoofing is when an email ends up in the spam folder. We help you to deal with emails in the spam folder.
• With the help of our practical tips, you can find out suspicious email senders.
• Further practical tips help you to protect yourself against phishing and pharming.
• If you are accidentally misused, for example by a virus, as a sender of spoofing mails, we will help you with a practical tip.
• Since brand spoofing, i.e. phishing and pharming, is the most common form of spoofing, we have created practical tips that will help you to identify fake Amazon emails and to expose fake PayPal emails. These are widespread due to the popularity and the large user community of the two.
• Fake emails on behalf of banks are particularly dangerous. We therefore offer you practical tips on how to recognize real Sparda Bank emails and how to identify fake emails on behalf of Deutsche Bank and Sparkasse.
• You can also read from us how to remove malware and adware as well as Trojans.