Spoofing

Spoofing is a class of attack in which some apparently reliable identifying information has been changed for the purpose of tricking the recipient into believing the source is legitimate rather than fraudulent. For example, source IP Addresses, MAC Addresses and email headers can all be spoofed. A spoofed source IP Address can be inserted into a packet header to cause a network's intrusion detection system to believe that traffic from outside the network actually originated inside the secure network. This could give unauthorized traffic access to your secure LAN. MAC Addresses can also be spoofed in order to defeat MAC Address Filtering, which is a security measure used on Wireless Networks to prevent unauthorized machines from associating with your WLAN. Email header spoofing is a method of attempting to convince an email recipient that a fraudulent email comes from a legitimate source. See the terms IP Address, MAC Address, Phishing, and WLAN in this Glossary for more information.