Don't get into the trap of Spoof Sites

Spoof sites are web sites created by fraudsters to force you to give them your information. The sites are just replica of original web sites. Take an example of PayPal.com. This site is popular target of fraudsters where, any information you enter will be going to dummy or spoof Paypal.com site and not to original PayPal.com.

In cyber-world the term spoofing is used as to fool. The term is used in various ways such as phishing, spamming ,e-mail spoofing and IP spoofing, in which online users of hardware and software can be fooled.

What is IP Spoofing?

Take an example of IP spoofing which involves fooling the innocent people that makes a message appear as if it came from an genuine IP address. This technique is used by phishers intentionally to lure innocent people. The spoof IP address is created by phishers to trap the innocent customers of legimate banking or finance web site. The aim of phishers is to loot the visitors.

Why networked devices generate spoofed replies?

Many times spoofing is used as a network management technique to reduce traffic where LAN protocols periodically send out packets to monitor the status of the network. There is enough bandwidth available in LAN, to easily absorb these network management packets.

The problem arises when computers are connected to the LAN over wide-area network (WAN) connections. It affects the bandwidth limits of the WAN connection, but it can also be expensive because many WAN connections incur fees only when they are transmitting data. To avoid it routers and other network devices can be programmed to spoof replies from the remote nodes, instead of sending the packets to the remote nodes and waiting for a reply, the devices generate their own-spoofed replies.

In modern times the word Internet is very much familiar. On the Internet, phishing is a scam where the fraudster sends legitimate looking e-mails appearing to come from some of the reputed Web-sites, including eBay, PayPal, Yahoo and America Online etc, to spoof innocent people and to get personal and financial information such as credit card number, password etc for their personal benefits.

Hacker's modus operandi

How is it possible? Simple, the fraudster just copy the source of original PayPal site(view-->source) or built using advanced scripts so that for all intents and purposes, it looks and acts like the real PayPal site. After a fraudster builds such a site, they will send you a Spam e-mail, requesting you to give the details such as password, credit card number and online banking account number. Many times innocent people provide their personal information on these spoof sites, assuming, as it is a genuine one.

The email sent by a phisher may contain a link that will look like https://www.PayPal.com/, but in fact the email will hide the real address, which will send Backdoor Trojan viruses to your computer system.

It is a common practice by malicious hackers who lure victims frequently to convincing replicas of e-commerce sites such as eBay, yahoo, msn and above discussed Paypal, where they're lured into disclosing financial and other private information. This method is a key tool in credit card number and identity theft.

It is recommended to use a proxy server or firewall to filter the character sequence out of Web addresses, and never follow links from spam e-mails and spoof sites.

So be cautious next time when you click a link from spoof sites.

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