Spoofing

"Spoofing" someone's email address is really hard, right? Only the most elite hackers can do it, right? It's not something that I can try at home, right?

no, no and no.

In the post "Testing SMTP" we discussed all of the commands necessary to fully deliver an email. Nothing special, no encryption, just a plain text email (without MIME-types, etc), but an email nonetheless. Below is the list of commands again in case you missed that post:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
HELO your hostname

MAIL FROM:

RCPT TO:

DATA

FROM:
TO:
SUBJECT: test

this is a test.
.

----------------------------------------------------------------

You'll notice something is missing in there. Something important for security. Something you do to many websites, to view your email, and often the first thing when you turn on your computer.

Don't scroll down, take a guess :-)






There's no login/password!

You could send yourself an email from GeorgeWashington@whitehouse.gov, or Bill@Microsoft.com saying whatever you like. Of course, you're still incredibly traceable, so don't get any bright ideas about sending an email "from" your boss giving yourself a raise or anything.

This is one way though that spammers and viruses hide their tracks or create a false sense of trust from their victim. SPF was implemented as a direct result of this flaw in SMTP's security.

Many times, spammers will "spoof" other users in their database of email addresses. Spam/virus filtering after the "Border-MTA" results then in backscatter, or bounces from email that was not sent by you. This is of course different than the article earlier about fake bounce message spam. Backscatter is legitimate bounces, but sent in response to an illegitimate use of the victim's email address.

Sometimes backscatter can inundate an inbox so thoroughly that it's hard to get any work done. In cases like this, ALL bounce messages should be blocked or moved to a folder keeping them out of the inbox. A common way to do this is to make a rule for these senders:

<>
postmaster@
mailer-daemon@

And that includes the following phrases:

"hi, this is the qmail send program"
"returned mail: see transcript for details"
"undeliverable mail returned to sender"
"delivery status notification (failure)"
"delivery status notification (delay)"
"out of office autoreply"

and any others that come in.

One of the reasons to not use a challenge-response anti-spam service is that they accept all email for your domain, then deliver "challenges" to which the sender must "respond". Since they accept the email, many deliver challenges to innocent users who are simply being abused by a spammer. Therefore you'll also want to include challenge response vendors in your filter.

Unfortunately, the lack of security in SMTP has been abused to no end. That's why it's imperative for your reputation, and a good "good neighbor" policy to implement SPF records. Although they're a little hard to grasp at first, They're the best way to be sure that nobody is using your email address without your permission. Unless you've been hacked, but that's a whole other post....


-TEA