Spoofing attacks

Spoofing is a type of networking attack, where intruders hides their own identity by proper, low-level modification of the IP address in the transmitted data frames.

Such type of activities aims at hiding the attacker’s identity (in all types of network attacks) or attempts to impersonate some other authorized network user and in the effect interfering with their network activity.

Due to potential anonymity of such attacks, they are often used to concoct Denial of Service attacks, very dangerous for all companies. This may cause pretty frequently damage to networking gear and result in extended inaccessibility of e.g. a web service to Company’s customers.

One of the most “spectacular" examples of such a type of attack in the history of computer networking was the spoofing attach used by Kevin Mitnick to access computer resources of Tsutomu Shimomura.


Counteraction:
Currently, spoofing type of attacks can be in many cases foiled by application of appropriate network filters as well as introduction of cryptographic communication protection.
It is also vital to consequently use all the patches released for the operating system kernel, improving among the others the mechanism of defining the initial sequential numbers in the TCP/IP stack.

Technical protection:
More about our individual offer of protection mechanism and means of counteracting impersonation attacks can be found in the sub pages [process security audit] and [network technology audit].