In the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.

Internet Protocol Spoofing

In computer networking, the term IP address spoofing or IP spoofing refers to the creation of Internet Protocol (IP) packets with a forged source IP address, called spoofing, with the purpose of concealing the identity of the sender or impersonating another computing system. By forging the header so it contains a different address, an attacker can make it appear that the packet was sent by a different machine. The machine that receives spoofed packets will send a response back to the forged source address, which means that this technique is mainly used when the attacker does not care about the response or the attacker has some way of guessing the response. In certain cases, it might be possible for the attacker to see or redirect the response to his own machine. The most usual case is when the attacker is spoofing an address on the same LAN or WAN. Hence the attackers have unauthorized access to computers.

IP spoofing is most frequently used in denial-of-service attacks, flooding the victim with overwhelming amounts of traffic, while the attacker does not care about receiving responses to the attack packets. Packets with spoofed addresses are thus suitable for such attacks. They have additional advantages for this purpose - they are more difficult to filter since each spoofed packet appears to come from a different address, and they hide the true source of the attack. Denial of service attacks that use spoofing typically randomly choose addresses from the entire IP address space, though more sophisticated spoofing mechanisms might avoid unroutable addresses or unused portions of the IP address space. The proliferation of large botnets makes spoofing less important in denial of service attacks, but attackers typically have spoofing available as a tool, if they want to use it, so defenses against denial-of-service attacks that rely on the validity of the source IP address in attack packets might have trouble with spoofed packets. Backscatter, a technique used to observe denial-of-service attack activity in the Internet, relies on attackers' use of IP spoofing for its effectiveness.

IP spoofing can also be a method of attack used by network intruders to defeat network security measures, such as authentication based on IP addresses. This method of attack on a remote system can be extremely difficult, as it involves modifying thousands of packets at a time. This type of attack is most effective where trust relationships exist between machines. For example, it is common on some corporate networks to have internal systems trust each other, so that users can log in without a username or password provided they are connecting from another machine on the internal network (and so must already be logged in). By spoofing a connection from a trusted machine, an attacker may be able to access the target machine without an authentication.

URL Spoofing and Phishing

Another kind of spoofing is "webpage spoofing," also known as phishing. In this attack, a legitimate web page such as a bank's site is reproduced in "look and feel" on another server under control of the attacker. The main intent is to fool the users into thinking that they are connected to a trusted site, for instance to harvest usernames and passwords.

This attack is often performed with the aid of URL spoofing, which exploits web browser bugs in order to display incorrect URLs in the browsers location bar; or with DNS cache poisoning in order to direct the user away from the legitimate site to the fake one. Once the user puts in their password, the attack-code reports a password error which then redirects the user back to the legitimate site.

Referrer Spoofing

Some websites, especially pornographic sites, allow access to their materials only from certain approved (login-) pages. This is enforced by checking the referrer header of the HTTP request, which however can be changed, allowing users to gain unauthorized access to the materials.

Source: Wikipedia