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What is spoofing? How to prevent spoofing on social media? 

What is spoofing? How to prevent spoofing on social media? 

Is that message on social media really from a friend asking for our help or a cybercriminal trying to lure you into divulging your personal information, accessing a malicious link, or downloading malware on your computer?  

Given the rise of social engineering-based attacks, it is more likely to be the latter.  Cybercriminals take advantage of the fact that many people are still simply unaware of spoofing and phishing.  It becomes vital to be aware of spoofing and its different types. 

Let’s delve into spoofing, its different types, and how to prevent social media-based spoofing.  

What is spoofing? 

In spoofing, a cybercriminal impersonates a legitimate identity to fool their targets into taking action. The main objective that cybercriminals seek to achieve with spoofing is to make their targets believe that they are communicating with a genuine person/organization.  

Cybercriminals often change a character/letter/symbol/number to deceive their targets for achieving other malicious objectives like stealing their personal/financial information, unloading malicious software, or carrying out more serious cyber attacks like advanced persistent threats. 

Modern-day spoofing attacks involve an adversary imitating an authorized user/device to carry out infiltration of a network and maintain persistence without getting detected.  

What makes spoofing attacks more dangerous is that businesses often undermine them compared to ransomware attacks and zero-day attacks. 

Different kinds of spoofing 

Cybercriminals use a range of fake identifications, including addresses, emails, numbers, and social media accounts to establish trust in their targets for carrying out an attack.  

Some of the common kinds of spoofing include 

  • Email spoofing  
  • Website spoofing 
  • Text-based spoofing 
  • IP spoofing  
  • DNS spoofing 
  • Social media-based spoofing 

What is the difference between phishing and spoofing? 

While both spoofing and phishing are often confused as the same, they are quite different. Where spoofing is the method, phishing is the main act. The main aim of phishing is to deceive/ bait the target (hence the word ‘fishing’) so the target engages in divulging personal information.  

Whereas the main aim of spoofing is to establish trust by impersonating an identity that can be trusted (for example: – a fake social media account impersonating an executive from Facebook)   

Earlier this year, Pepco, a major European retailer lost 15.5 million to cyber attackers who spoofed legitimate email IDs to fraud staff from the finance department to transfer funds.  

How to prevent spoofing on social media? 

Since more people are now on social media than ever before, with over 5.04 billion social media user identities (Datareportal 2024), it has become a hub for cybercriminals.  

On social media, hackers find a huge pool of targets (62.3% of the population!) (Datareportal 2024) they can hunt to achieve several malicious objectives depending on their motives.  

In a typical social media spoofing, a cybercriminal creates a fake social media profile to defame, extort, or transfer malware. They might copy important information like username, profile picture, bio information, contact details, etc. from a real profile to make the fake profile seem genuine.  

Social media spoofing has become more frequent and sophisticated than before with cybercriminals targeting social media sites like LinkedIn.

These threats can have a negative impact on the reputation of a business/individual.  

Cybercriminals leverage the fact that most people are unaware of the threats of spoofing on social media.  

Here are some ways through which one can prevent social media-based spoofing: 

Follow cybersecurity hygiene practices 

One of the best ways to prevent social media-based spoofing is to ensure your account’s fundamental security by implementing best practices like keeping your account private, enabling location-based login notifications, setting a strong password, and enabling multi-factor authentication.  

Setting a strong password means following password best practices like setting a password that is not one of the commonly used passwords, has more than 16 characters, isn’t a word in the dictionary, and uses alphanumeric with special characters. 

Don’t respond to messages/emails from unrecognized senders 

When you receive messages or emails from someone you don’t know, then you shouldn’t respond to them.  

Cybercriminals use social engineering methods to bait their targets into taking actions like clicking on a link that redirects to a malicious site or downloading malware disguised as genuine software, etc. 

Report and block fake accounts 

Report and block fake accounts when you spot any suspicious accounts with information that belongs to someone you know. It helps authorities take appropriate action against them.  

If you spot any account where there is incomplete information, for example, the profile picture is of a real person, but the bio information is incomplete or inconsistent with that of a real person.  

In such cases, it is best to report the profile and block them from orchestrating tailored phishing attacks. 

Avoid sharing personal information 

Before carrying out their attack, hackers spend time gathering information about their targets. They do so using publicly available sources where their targets would post information. This could be anything from social media accounts to publicly available information on the internet.  

Hackers build a profile of their targets based on OSINT or Open Source Intelligence which is the information gathered through all the available sources on the internet through multiple ways like using dedicated people search sites to gather information like email addresses, family details, education details, contact numbers, and even resumes. Therefore, it is critical to avoid sharing or posting personal information on the internet that could be used for spoofing.  

Create a policy that restricts users from sharing organizational/sensitive information on social media. Establish a mechanism where employees can report incidents of spoofing on social media.   

FBI-recommended tips to secure yourself from spoofing attacks 

The following are some of the tips for prevention of spoofing: 

  • Avoid clicking on an unsolicited text or email 
  • Verify the number with the official page of the organization 
  • Carefully examine email address, URL, and spelling before replying 
  • Be careful of what you download. Do not open attachments from unknown people 
  • Set up Multi-factor authentication  

Be careful what you share on social media (ask yourself “Does it contain anything that can be exploited?”) 

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