Email Attacks

Now a days usage of email writings have increased. On the other hand these emails can be spoofed, spammed. Some of the major threats have been discussed here.

Email spoof, identify attack, Email bombing and email spoofing:

First of all let us discuss about the basic working of email. You can skip this topic if you are familiar with email. Email stands for electronic mail service. It helps us to send and receive digital mails. Sending and Receiving the emails can be controlled by servers. 

• Let us say abc is registered with gmail sever by name abc@gmail.com and xyz registered with yahoo server. 
• if abc sends a mail to xyz the process is as follows:
• mail sent by abc is received to gmail server and then this gmail server checks for the xyz' s yahoo account and later forwards the mail to xyz@yahoo.com

Spoofed mail:

  Spoofed email is also called as fake email. This fake email may come from any sender with some other's identity. The fake sender mail id may or may not exists. It doesn't matters.

  

Different methods can be used to spoof an email. Some of them are discussed below:

• Using open relay servers:   This is the process which may not works. In this we can maintain a open server which can allow people to send emails by connecting to it. User can connect it via telnet. This is an outdated technique which is used once, so it is not necessary to discuss more about open relay server.

• Using websites:  Many websites provide us to send fake emails. Many of them provide free service but the problem is that they attach advertisements along with the mails. Best of them that provide free service without any advertisements are given below:

              www.emkei.cz

              

• Using mail sending scripts: The PHP contains mail sending function which allows us to send fake mails with headers. For that we need to upload the php script into the hosting sites. Many hosting sites doesn't allow you to upload such malicious content. some of the working hosting sites are x10hosting.com , 000webhost.com . 

            You can download the php script here.

Email Spamming and Email Bombing:

    Email spamming and bombing are the techniques used to collect information. Bombing means sending large number of emails in a single click. These activities can be performed by spammers and advertisers. Many spammers send mails asking to fill the details and claim your prize type emails. These spammers steal the information and sell it to the business people who need information. 

How to identify whether the email is real or spoofed:

  We can easily find such type of emails by viewing email headers. Email headers are the headers which show us the travelling path of the email from sender to receiver. It contains a lot of other information also. The name of the headers vary from server to server. In gmail it can be seen by clicking show original whereas on yahoo it can seen by clicking  full headers. 

If an email received from gmail server and originated from other server is a spoofed mail. So first we need to check the origination of a received mail. If it came from unknown hosting site then simply we should ignore the mail