Email Spoofing: What It Is and How to Protect Your Business
Email Spoofing Costs Almost Nothing to Pull Off
Email spoofing is the practice of sending an email that appears to come from a trusted source when it actually comes from somewhere else entirely. For small businesses, spoofed emails are one of the most common starting points for fraud, data theft, and unauthorized access to business systems, and understanding how email spoofing works is the first step toward making sure your business doesn’t fall for it.
How Email Spoofing Works
Email wasn’t originally designed with security in mind. The system that powers it has no built-in way to confirm that the sender is who they claim to be, so with the right tools, anyone can put any name and address they want in the “from” field. The message looks completely legitimate in your inbox, since your email program simply shows whatever the sender typed there instead of where the message really came from.
A spoofed email might look like it’s from your bank, a vendor you work with regularly, a government agency, or even someone inside your own organization. The goal of email spoofing is always the same: get the recipient to act on a request because they believe it came from someone they trust.
Email Spoofing and Business Email Compromise
One of the most financially damaging uses of email spoofing is business email compromise. An attacker spoofs or takes over the email address of someone with authority, often an owner or the person who handles finances, and uses it to ask for a wire transfer, a change in payment information, or access to sensitive data. The recipient thinks it’s a normal internal request and complies, and by the time anyone notices, the money is usually gone for good.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center consistently ranks business email compromise among the costliest scams it tracks. Small businesses get targeted regularly because they tend to have less oversight around payments and fewer checks in place to verify unusual requests.
Technical Protections Against Email Spoofing
Three email authentication standards work together to make email spoofing harder: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. SPF lists which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain, DKIM adds a digital signature that receiving servers can check, and DMARC builds on both by telling receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks. Setting these records up correctly on your domain makes it much harder for attackers to convincingly impersonate your business, and it helps filter out spoofed messages pretending to come from other protected domains.
A lot of small businesses have none of these records in place, which means their domain can be spoofed freely and they have no way of seeing when it’s happening. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommends email authentication as a basic protection for organizations of every size.
What Your Team Needs to Know About Email Spoofing
Technical protections cut down how much spoofed email gets through, although they can’t stop all of it, which makes employee awareness the other half of the defense. Your team should know that any email asking for a wire transfer, a change in payment details, login credentials, or unusual access needs to be verified another way before anyone acts on it. A quick phone call to a number you already have on file takes thirty seconds and can prevent a serious loss.
Employees should also know how to look past the display name and check the actual sending address, which most email programs show with a single click. If you’re not sure whether your domain has the right protections against email spoofing, reach out to Glitch Technology for a free assessment and we’ll give you a clear answer.
Protecting your business from email-based threats including spoofing and business email compromise is part of how we manage your IT environment. Glitch Technology provides managed IT services and computer support in Jacksonville, IL. We take full ownership of IT environments for small businesses and municipal organizations through proactive monitoring, preventative maintenance, and strategic planning.