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Posts Tagged ‘forged email’

Ask Erik: Is this email fake? How can I tell?

Thursday, December 28th, 2017

In a recent “Ask Erik” question, Eve asked:

“I received a copy of an email that someone claims they sent to me. They did not forward this apparent email they claim they sent to me. Rather they copied and pasted it into a current email.

However, I did not receive this email, and in all honesty this apparent copy of this email looks fake. I believe I could easily create this type of fake email myself. So, is there a way of telling whether someone has faked an email which they claim they sent to you? And, should I insist that the original email they claim they sent to be is forwarded to me and not copied and pasted?”

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Tags: email, fake, forged, forged email
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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Save Yourself From “Yourself”: Stop Spam From Your Own Address

Friday, September 22nd, 2017

I just got junk email … from me!

It is surprisingly common for users to receive Spam email messages that appear to come from their own address (i.e. “joe@domain.com” gets a Spam email addressed so it appears to be from “joe@domain.com”).  We discussed this issue tangentially in a previous posting: Bounce Back & BackScatter Spam – “Who Stole My Email Address”?  However, many users wonder how this is even possible, while others are concerned if their Spam filters are not catching these messages.

How can Spammers use your email address to send Spam?

The way that email works at a fundamental level, there is very little validation performed on the apparent identity of the “Sender” of an email.  Just as you could mail a letter at the post office and write any return address on it, a Spammer can compose and send an email address with any “From” email address and name.  This is in fact extremely easy to do, and Spammers use this facility with almost every message that they send.

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Tags: allow list, dkim, email address, filtering, forged email, sender, smtp, spam, spf, white list
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email, Popular Posts
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Self-Addressed Spoofed Email: How to Shut Down Spam

Thursday, May 11th, 2017

Spam messages coming from… your own email? This may sound like a cheesy movie plot, but this form of spam, known as “spoofing,” can have horrifying consequences if they result in compromised security, stolen data, or malware on your company’s machines. Read on to find out how to snuff out spoofing and help everyone avoid these attacks in the future.

Forged Email

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Tags: dkim, email, forged email, pgp, s/mime, SFP
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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Infographic: Steps to Avoiding Forged Email

Friday, February 12th, 2016

Forged emails are extremely common. Most of the time forged emails are merely a nuisance.However, if you accidentally share information with or click on a link from someone who sent a forged email, the results can devastate your goal or even your site, or if it’s really evil, an entire computer. Here’s some information about how to recognize and stop forged emails.

How to Avoid Forged Email: Forged Email Facts & SPF Significance

Avoiding Forged Email. Significance of SPF

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Tags: dkim, forged email, spam, spf
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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Stopping Forged Email 1: SPF to the Rescue

Tuesday, February 17th, 2015

SPFWe have recently looked at how hackers and spammers can send forged emails and then seen how these forged messages can be almost identical to legitimate messages from the purported senders. We learned that generally, all you can trust in an inbound email message is the internet IP address of the server talking to your inbound email server. This cannot realistically be forged in any way that would still enable you to receive the message.

We know who the message is from and the server’s address that delivered it to us. How can we reliably prevent fraud by checking if the message was forged or not? Seems hard.

It turns out that a number (yes, more than one!) of techniques can be used to do this. The first and simplest is SPF – Sender Policy Framework. Below, we shall look at what this does, how it works, how to set it up, and what some of its deficiencies are. In future articles, we will look at the other techniques.

Sender Policy Framework: A Super Simple Explanation

Simply put, SPF is a way for the owner of a domain, such as bankofamerica.com, to publish information indicating what servers (internet addresses) are authorized to send email from that domain. Recipients (e.g., your spam filtering software) can check the internet address that is trying to send you an email from bankofamerica.com against this authorization list- if it is on it, the message is probably legitimate; if not, it’s probably forged.

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Tags: dns, forged email, fraud, identity, sender policy framework, spam, spf, SRS
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email
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