28-03-2012, 12:58 PM
Email Spoofing
Email spoofing is a technique used by malicious users to disseminate viruses by camouflaging the sender’s identity. It is also used by ‘spammers’ to send mass junk e-mails. In this technique the real sender utilizes other people’s addresses making the e-mails appear as if they are coming from a different source.
The sender does not want to be identified and therefore changes the originating source to another one making it difficult to trace the origin of the e-mail back to the real sender.
How do malicious hackers get their hands on your e-mail address?
When a virus attack is launched one of the goals is to gather e-mail addresses to ‘spoof’. Recent computer worms are programmed to strip out email addresses from word documents, address books, web sites, text files, and excel files, among others. Suppose a home student computer is hacked by one of these malicious programs, more than likely your e-mail address will be found on this computer. The worm will then be able to add your address to the list of e-mail address it can use to send more copies of itself to other people, hoping that they will open the attachment because it came from you.
Are you getting Virus Alert Messages saying that you sent a virus?
If your e-mail address has been “spoofed”, you may receive numerous auto-generated virus alert messages sent by our Norton Antivirus server letting you know that ‘you’ are sending viruses via e-mail. Generally if you’ve been spoof, you will not recall sending it and/or you will not recognize the people to whom ‘you’ are e-mailing it. Rest assured that just because your e-mail address may have been ‘spoofed’ it does not mean that your mailbox has been compromised. To be on the safe side:
1) Run a virus scan on your computer
2) Delete the message
3) If a virus is found on your campus computer, contact the Help Desk (4357) for instructions or enter a ticket via
There are legitimate uses for ‘spoofing’:
A user has several email accounts and wants all responses sent from just one account. The user can ‘spoof’ the recipient by changing the originating account to reflect the primary email address he/she want to use and have the responses sent to that primary email account.
For instance: you want all of your Yahoo incoming e-mails directed to your Hotmail account. You can ‘spoof’ yourself by pretending that the responses to your Yahoo e-mails are really being sent from Yahoo but in reality you are sending them from your Hotmail account and anyone responding to those will be redirected to your Hotmail account.