Tuesday, March 26, 2024

How To Stop Domain Spoofing

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Guide To Spoofing Attacks: Stay One Step Ahead Of Attackers

How to Prevent Email Spoofing with DKIM, DMARC & SPF

Spoofing attacks are some of the most varied threats that confront modern organizations. Whereas many attacks all have certain patterns, spoof attacks come in many different forms each with their own threats and end goals. Sometimes the attacker is on the hunt for information and other times the attacker wants to DOS your key services into oblivion.

While you cant stop every attack from making its way through, being aware of the threats and taking steps to limit the risks of an attacker making it through will help to keep your network online. Getting rid of blind trust and analyzing packets will make it that much more difficult for attackers to slip through undetected.

The most critical part of preventing spoofing attacks is making sure that you define a cybersecurity policy tailor-made with these attacks in mind. Making staff aware of spoofing attacks and the precautions they should take will help to ward off spoofing attacks that come your way.

Alignment Strict Or Relaxed

Identifier alignment in DMARC means two domains match. There are two modes in identifier alignment: strict and relaxed.

In strict mode, the two domains must be identical in order for them to be in alignment. For example: example.net aligns with example.net in strict mode, while example.net doesn’t align with mail.example.net.

In relaxed mode, the two domains don’t have to match exactly: as long as the organizational domains match, they align with each other. For example: example.net not only aligns with example.net in relaxed mode, but also aligns with mail.example.net.

Steal Users Personal And Financial Information

Phishing is a form of social engineering attack and is typically executed to steal sensitive information. This can be personal data like phone numbers, physical and virtual addresses, medical data, or login credentials. Scammers are also especially keen to steal financial information like credit card, bank account, and social security numbers.

Through domain spoofing, impersonators pretend to be a trusted entity like a well-known brand and trick a victim into clicking on a malicious link or asking users to reveal sensitive data. Clicking on a fraudulent link can lead to the installation of malware on the device of the user or spying on personal data without the detection of the user. Victims might also be asked to actively reveal sensitive information when imposters use a domain in an email sent to customers or employees of a company pretending to be the legitimate sender or entity.

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Domain Spoofing: How It Works And What You Can Do To Avoid It

According to a recent study by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis , almost 30,000 spoofing attacks occurred each day from March 2015 to February 2017. Today, the number of attacks continues to exponentially increase across the world.

Companies and other organizations that fall victim to spoofing attacks can end up losing millions in revenue. The good news is many of these attacks are preventable with the correct system configuration, employee training, and high-quality cybersecurity tools.

Here are the different types of spoofing attacks to watch out for and the best ways to keep your organization protected from cybercriminals.

Domain Spoofing The Hidden Change Happening Right Before Your Eyes

Display Name Spoofing Spam

Have you ever been on a websiteâbut youâre not really on that website? Itâs confusing, but a simple tweak to a website’s url turns it into a separate website.

Can you spot the difference without looking carefully?

  • Instagram.com vs. instgram.com
  • Amazon.com vs. amazonn.com
  • Prnewswire.com vs. Prnnewswire.com

If youâre not careful, you might find yourself on one of these fake websites. A simple change to the domain suffix from â.comâ to â.orgâ turns it into something different, if that domain suffix is not yet claimed.

Take Pancakeswapâs website, for example. The original domain is âpancakeswap.finance,â with other suffixes like .com, .net, and .info.

Ripping off this website is possible when you buy the same initial domain with a suffix like â.org.”

Suppose this is successful: What just happened is called domain spoofing, and every day, more than 30,000 spoofing attacks occur worldwide.

In this post, weâll share all you need to know about domain spoofing, how it affects your business, how to detect it, and ways to prevent it.

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Domain Name Spoofing Is More Common Than You Think

According to the Federal Trade Commission, over 96% of companies operating are vulnerable to domain spoofing attacks in one form or another. According to other research, 91% of phishing attacks are display name spoofs. The bottom line is that domain name spoofing is probably threatening your company.

You might think with such a common problem that most organization would have addressed it, but youd be wrong. Although there are technologies to combat domain name spoofing, because of their complexity, only between 21% and 53% of companies elect to deploy them, depending on the technology. For example, if your DMARC policy is not p=reject, thats a problem.

What Are The Protective Mechanisms To Prevent Domain Spoofing

  • SSL certificates – An SSL certificate is a text file that identifies a website and aids in encrypting traffic to and from the website. The certificate authority will verify the right of the applicant to use a specific domain name. Almost all legitimate websites will have an SSL certificate.

    But spoofed websites may also have a real SSL certificate â but the certificate will be for the spoofed domain name, not for the actual domain name.

  • Bookmarks – Keep an in-browser bookmark of each legitimate website, which can be used to save a websiteâs URL for future reference. Instead of following a link or typing the URL, by clicking on the bookmark, it ensures the legitimate URL loads whenever accessing it.

  • The most crucial protective mechanism is to educate employees and conduct training sessions with mock scenarios.

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    How To Tell If An Email Is Spoofed

    Detecting email spoofs can be difficult, especially when they originate from a source with a valid domain name . However, there are ways you can determine whether an email originated from another computer or was forged by someone else. Here are some tips for detecting emails that have been forged:Prefer we do it for you? Schedule a quick chat with me to learn more:

    Look at the address in your “From” field and see if it matches the actual sender’s address. Unfortunately, this isn’t foolproof because the attacker might use a compromised mailbox located within the company’s email server rather than using their own personal email account. If you notice an email coming from a non-existent e-mail box, that’s always a dead giveaway. Also, check the email header. If this has been forged, you will likely see a number of inconsistencies in the “Received” fields.

    Also, check the “To” field to determine if there are any obvious misspellings or incorrect nouns. Make sure you’re sending your replies to an actual email address as well. The best method for determining email authenticity is by directly contacting the sender through a different channel such as by phone. You can also use free tools like MxToolbox, which can help you verify whether specific domains support PTR records and SPF records. These tools should give you enough information to determine whether or not the sending domain is legitimate.

    This video gives you a little more insight into how to spot a spoof:

    Stop Domain Spoofing With Mimecast

    How DKIM SPF & DMARC Work to Prevent Email Spoofing

    Mimecast provides solutions that help companies mitigate risk and reduce the cost and complexity of building a cyber-resilient organization.

    To protect against domain spoofing via the web, Mimecast Web Security solutions block user access to web resources that may be malicious or that are considered inappropriate for business use. When a user requests a web resource by clicking a link or entering a URL in a browser, Mimecast serves as a web security gateway and inspects the address to make sure it is legitimate, using advanced threat intelligence and the company’s own security policies. For web resources that are considered safe, Mimecast permits immediate access without delay. When web sources are deemed to be suspicious or unacceptable, Mimecast blocks access and informs the user of the reasons why via a block page.

    To protect against domain spoofing via email, Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection uses DNS authentication services, including SPF/DKIM/DMARC, to evaluate domains and to block email deemed to be suspicious. Mimecast also protects against domain spoofing with:

    • URL Protect, a service that uses multiple, sophisticated detection engines and threat intelligence to block users from clicking on malicious links within email messages.
    • Impersonation Protect, a service that performs real-time scanning of all inbound emails to identify potential anomalies in headers, domain similarity, sender spoofing and suspect email body content.

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    What Is Domain Spoofing Protection

    Domain spoofing protection offers businesses a way to monitor and safeguard their domain from being spoofed. Brands often work with more than one domain which requires a protection plan that is capable of safeguarding entire domain portfolios. As this is difficult to do manually, domain spoofing protection is usually exerted by a software solution. Overall, a domain spoofing protection solution enables brands to control and enforce their domain portfolios on a broad scale.

    Also known as domain monitoring software, a good domain monitoring service should include a variety of options to choose from, so clients can build their own service based on their needs regarding detection, enforcement, and/or assessment. This is important as brands can find themselves in a variety of risk scenarios that require individual solutions.

    Stop Others Sending Email Messages From Your Domain

    The DMARC record that Postmark provides is very good for identifying which servers send emails purporting to be from your domain. The DMARC record however doesnt instruct servers receiving messages that fail your SPF and DKIM alignment to do anything with the messages. We can amend the DMARC record to quarantine any messages that fail SPF and DKIM alignment . To quarantine messages that fail alignment amend the TXT record for DMARC then change the TXT record to be like:v=DMARC1 p=quarantine pct=100 rua=mailto:12345example@dmarc.postmarkapp.com sp=quarantine aspf=r

    Before you instruct messages that fail SPF or DKIM alignment to be quarantined it is important to ensure that messages being legitimately sent from email sending services you use are aligning both SPF and DKIM.

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    Protocols Are Not Perfect

    SPF, DKIM DMARC are not perfect, for many reasons including these:

    • Hacker could be sending a malicious email from within a compromised domain environment
    • Hacker could be using a domain that enables and uses SPF and DKIM
    • Many commercial email hosts do not respect your settings or all settings. Many times, its due to the way large email hosts work using many servers over many changing IP addresses to send email on behalf of your domain

    Even with the flaws, enabling SPF, DKIM and DMARC can only help you. It will cut down on some portion of your fraudulently received spoof emails, and that is only good.

    Just be sure to never completely reject any email that fails one or more verification tests. Legitimate emails fail these checks all the time. You want to set SPF, DKIM and DMARC so that they will let any failed email be inspected by a human defender . If you find that SPF, DKIM or DMARC causes too many problems, you can always choose less aggressive settings, or if a complete failure, disable them altogether .

    One more note. Office 365 users frequently complain that Microsoft does not respect all their email defense settings. Many 0ffice 365 admins set up an Exchange rule to block emails that spoof the receivers own domain.

    Next read this

    How To Use Dkim

    DMARC: How to Prevent Email Spoofing

    DKIM takes a bit more knowledge than SPF to set up. It requires a modification to that senders email server/servicei. The sender has to create/get a cryptographic public/private key pair, install it on their email server/service, and then create a DNS TXT record that contains their public key. Each outgoing email is signed by the email servers private key and receivers can verify the digitally signed email by using the senders public key.

    Heres an example of a DKIM DNS TXT record :

    selector._domainkey.example.com IN TXT v=DKIM1 p=RAG123

    This is an example DKIM email header:

    Roger Grimes

    This is an example of a DKIM email header successfully verified:

    Roger Grimes

    Verified DKIM email header

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    Email Spoofing And Homograph Attacks Two Sides Of A Coin

    We can distinguish two forms of spoofing:

    • Spoofing that spoofs a real email address
    • or the use of another email address, which is very close visually or credible in the phishing scenario. These are called homograph attacks.

    Lets take grace.hopper@sciences.com as an example to explain homograph attacks. They rely on various tricks to impersonate the desired person or organisation:

    • Changing, reversing, adding or deleting characters: grace.hopper@sciemces.com
    • Use of non-Latin characters : grace.hopper@scieces.com
    • Use of a close or credible domain in the attack: grace.hopper@sciences.us grace.hopper@science.com

    The only limit in the possibilities of variation is the imagination of the attackers and the constraints of SMTP . You can detect homograph attacks by looking carefully at the senders address. Sometimes you have to click on Reply to message to see the real reply address, if the attacker had also displayed another sender address.

    The difficulty, when you know the contact, is to recognise the sender at a glance without reading the address and start processing the email. Busy in a working day, its easy to fall into the trap.

    Homograph attacks are more frequently used than email spoofing, as it has become harder to execute. Spam filters and other email service indicators rely on the absence of all three protocols to classify emails as spam or phishing.

    Its therefore essential to configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC so that:

    How To Implement Dmarc

    This section serves as a mini-guide with the goal to help you jump right in implementing DMARC. These actionable steps outlined below will help you avoid being overwhelmed by a myriad of technical acronyms and maintain your sanity. DMARC is not hard after all.

    If you’d like to learn more about SPF/DKIM/DMARC and email overall, feel free to start from the beginning of this guide.

    Now let’s implement DMARC. First things first. Inventory your email domains you want to protect, and do the following steps for each one of them.

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    How To Identify A Spoofed Email

    As mentioned, in email spoofing, the sender forges the email header fields, so the message appears to be received from a trusted source. Let us look at various fields of an email header to understand and identify a spoofed email. We have taken a sample email header .

    Figure 1: Sample Email Header

    In the email header, the Delivered-To field highlights the receivers email address. If it is a legitimate email, Return-Path,Received, and From fields will contain the same email address.

    As shown in Figure 1, the Received field shows that the email came from the domain cyberattack1.org. Also, the Return-Path and From fields contain the email address nandinikumar311979@gmail.com, which is different from the Received field. This indicates that the header fields have been forged.

    What Is The Goal Of Email Spoofing

    How DKIM SPF & DMARC Work to Prevent Email Spoofing

    The ultimate goal of sending from a spoofed email address is to trick the recipient into opening the message and either clicking a link or responding to its contents. The sender relies on impersonation to complete their scam, with the goal of encouraging the recipient to interact with its malicious contentwhether by entering credentials into a site, sending money directly to the attacker, or downloading malware to their computer, among other nefarious acts.

    Not all spoofing incidents are serious. However, more harmful spoofed email communications can cause significant damage. Some of the more serious risks associated with spoofing include:

    • Malware insertion

    • Reputational damage

    • Financial losses

    Regardless of the goal of the attacker, spoofing can cause serious damage and disruption to organizations. Understanding how these attacks function is the first step to preparing an email spoofing prevention strategy.

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    Using A Dedicated Receive Connector

    The second method is creating an additional Receive connector on the port 25. The connector controls the local network and lets through only emails from domain users. This approach uses a different authorization method. Instead of using IPs, it uses domain credentials . The change of the authorization method generates one problem all internal Exchange connections have to be authorized. In other words, every web device and application which sends emails to Exchange requires a domain account .

    As I have mentioned before, the connector will be set for the TCP port 25. But, as you may know, there is already a Receive connector, which accepts anonymous connections from SMTP servers on port 25. So how can this connector coexist with the one you are about to create? And how does Exchange know which one to choose? Exchange Server is quite intelligent when it comes to this. The server will always choose the more precise connector for each connection. The Receive connector I configure is defined for LAN networks, while the default one applies to all connections. Hence, for internal SMTP connections, Exchange will always choose the new connector, specified for LAN.

    So What Is Domain Spoofing

    As the name implies, domain spoofing happens when a low-quality publisher disguises itself as a premium publisher in a programmatic marketplace. Spoofing a premium publisher makes the ad impressions more valuable and the demand will also be typically high.

    Advertisers believe their ads are showing up at the premium websites, for the right audience. However, the fraudsters will show them up at the low-quality websites, for the bots .

    Methbot, the most profitable ad fraud operation to date, has spoofed 250,267 distinct URLs to falsely represent inventory.

    WhiteOps

    Generally, fraudsters build a domain that closely resembles the URL of legitimate publishers. Not only do they create fake domains, but they can also create a duplicate copy of the websites content.

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