What is IP spoofing? – Kaspersky
Spoofing is a specific type of cyber-attack in which someone attempts to use a computer, device, or network to trick other computer networks by masquerading as a legitimate entity. It’s one of many tools hackers use to gain access to computers to mine them for sensitive data, turn them into zombies (computers taken over for malicious use), or launch Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Of the several types of spoofing, IP spoofing is the most common.
How spoofing works
To start, a bit of background on the internet is in order. The data transmitted over the internet is first broken into multiple packets, and those packets are transmitted independently and reassembled at the end. Each packet has an IP (Internet Protocol) header that contains information about the packet, including the source IP address and the destination IP address.
In IP spoofing, a hacker uses tools to modify the source address in the packet header to make the receiving computer system think the packet is from a trusted source, such as another computer on a legitimate network, and accept it. Because this occurs at the network level, there are no external signs of tampering.
This type of attack is common in Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can overwhelm computer networks with traffic. In a DoS attack, hackers use spoofed IP addresses to overwhelm computer servers with packets of data, shutting them down. Geographically dispersed botnets — networks of compromised computers — are often used to send the packets. Each botnet potentially contains tens of thousands of computers capable of spoofing multiple source IP addresses. As a result, the automated attack is difficult to trace.
A variation on this approach uses thousands of computers to send messages with the same spoofed source IP address to a huge number of recipients. The receiving machines automatically transmit acknowledgement to the spoofed IP address and flood the targeted server.
Another malicious IP spoofing method uses a “Man-in-the-Middle” attack to interrupt communication between two computers, alter the packets, and then transmit them without the original sender or receiver knowing. Over time, hackers collect a wealth of confidential information they can use or sell.
In systems that rely on trust relationships among networked computers, IP spoofing can be used to bypass IP address authentication. The idea behind the “castle and moat” defense is simple: Those outside the network are considered threats, and those inside the castle are trusted. Once a hacker breaches the network and makes it inside, it’s easy to explore the system. Considering that vulnerability, using simple authentication as a defense strategy is being replaced by more robust security approaches, such as those with multi-step authentication.
Steps to Avoid Spoofing
Most of the strategies used to avoid IP spoofing must be developed and deployed by IT specialists. The options to protect against IP spoofing include monitoring networks for atypical activity, deploying packet filtering to detect inconsistencies (like outgoing packets with source IP addresses that don’t match those on the organization’s network), using robust verification methods (even among networked computers), authenticating all IP addresses, and using a network attack blocker. Placing at least a portion of computing resources behind a firewall is also a good idea.
Web designers are encouraged to migrate sites to IPv6, the newest Internet Protocol. It makes IP spoofing harder by including encryption and authentication steps. Most of the world’s internet traffic still uses the previous protocol, IPv4. The Seattle Internet Exchange (one of two in the world showing IPv6 traffic statistics) indicates that only about 11 percent of traffic has migrated to the newer, more secure protocol as of mid-November 2017.
For end users, detecting IP spoofing is virtually impossible. They can minimize the risk of other types of spoofing, however, by using secure encryption protocols like HTTPS — and only surfing sites that also use them.
Related Articles:
Man-in-the-Middle Attack and How to Defend Yourself
How Does DDoS Attack Work?
What is a Botnet?
Kaspersky Secure Connection
What is IP spoofing? Spoofing is a type of cyber-attack that can be used by hackers to gain access to computers and mine them for sensitive data. Learn how to avoid IP Spoofing.
VPN vs IP Spoofing- What’s The Difference? – Internet Access Guide
vpn vs ip spoofing
VPN vs IP Spoofing
VPNs and IP Spoofing are two concepts that are often confused with one another by people who aren’t familiar with the various intricacies of the internet but, in reality, these are two vastly different things that are used for entirely separate purposes.
VPN
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a secured private network that’s designed to encrypt and secure incoming and outgoing traffic over the internet. It can essentially be thought of as a secure tunnel through which internet users can safely and securely browse and surf the internet without any major security concerns. The internet is a vast place and there’s no doubt that using it comes with various inherent risks such as your data being potentially monitored or your location being traced by those with malicious intent.
These threats can be quite dangerous but, fortunately, VPNs are able to protect against all these and they do so by routing all your internet traffic over a secured private network thereby ensuring that no malicious third parties can sniff your traffic or trace your location through information such as your IP address.
What’s great about VPNs is the fact that any worthwhile VPN service will fully encrypt your traffic so, even in case a third party was able to intercept the data packets being sent to and from your network, they wouldn’t be able to make much of them as the data would be encrypted and would be nothing but gibberish to the malicious third party aiming to breach it. Due to all this, VPNs are often regarded as one of the most secure ways of communicating over the internet so.
As awareness of staying secure while using the internet has gone up over the years, so has the presence of various VPN services. As of right now, there are multitudes of high-end VPN services that users can utilize in order to protect themselves while using the internet.
Most VPN services specialize in different aspects so, no matter what your needs and requirements are, you’re bound to find one that’ll meet them all perfectly. Some VPN services focus on keeping a user’s location secure and hidden, some focus on maintaining high speeds while providing routing over different countries, some are built for gamers who’d like to reduce their ping by rerouting their connection over a secure route and some offer a package of various services.
IP Spoofing
While VPNs are primarily used for the purpose of securing communications over the internet, IP Spoofing is often used for quite the opposite. Simply put, IP Spoofing is when someone spoofs, or masks, their IP address with that of another computer or source, and doing so enables them to perform various malicious tasks against unsuspecting systems and networks. Each packet of data sent over the internet has a specific destination address designating where it’s going and a source address designating where it’s coming from.
Perhaps the most common use of IP Spoofing is to bypass secure firewalls. Most secure networks typically have firewalls preventing any unrecognized source addresses from coming through but, through IP spoofing, these firewalls can be breached as they wouldn’t be able to recognize that the source of the particular data packet has been spoofed and isn’t, in fact, from a recognized source.
Due to this, if an attacker’s source IP has been placed on a blacklist by a particular firewall, it wouldn’t be able to actually thwart incoming attacks from that particular source if the attacker has successfully spoofed the source IP address.
Another malicious use of IP Spoofing is Man in the Middle attacks. These attacks are most common in crowded areas with public networks such as shops or airports where users tend to unsuspectingly connect to the open WiFi networks that are available.
In these attacks, the attacker essentially places themselves in the ‘middle’ of your device and the website or service that you’re communicating to through IP spoofing and, by doing so, they’re able to sniff all incoming and outgoing traffic from your device which, of course, is something that can have a devastating impact if you’re sending sensitive data such as banking details.
It’s key to remember that, while it certainly has a variety of malicious uses, IP Spoofing isn’t inherently illegal as the act of masking your IP is something that even VPN services for their protective measures.
Fortunately, there are ways to protect against malicious attacks that utilize IP Spoofing. Simply monitoring your network activity and looking for any atypical activity can give you insight regarding whether or not your network is vulnerable and, alongside this, there are several other measures as well such as ingress and egress filtering and Deep Packet Inspection.
It’s also worth highlighting that, as long as you’re visiting secure HTTPs websites, you aren’t at risk for an IP Spoofing attack as the traffic to these websites is secured through the TLS/SSL protocol so your connection will be encrypted at all times. VPNs are another effective way to shield yourself from IP Spoofing attacks.
Detecting IP Spoofing by Modelling History of IP Address Entry Points
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Lecture Notes in Computer Science
book series (LNCS, volume 7943)AbstractSince a lot of the networks do not apply source IP filtering to its outgoing traffic, an attacker may insert an arbitrary source IP address in an outgoing packet, i. e., IP address spoofing. This paper elaborates on a possibility to detect the spoofing in a large network peering with other networks. A proposed detection scheme is based on an analysis of NetFlow data collected at the entry points in the network. The scheme assumes that the network traffic originating from a certain source network enters the network under surveillance via a relatively stable set of points. The scheme has been tested on data from the real ywordsDestination Network Outgoing Packet Propose Detection Scheme Probabilistic Packet Marking ICMP Packet
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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to read the full conference paper lenky, A., Ansari, N. : IP traceback with deterministic packet marking. IEEE Communications Letters 7(4), 162–164 (2003)CrossRefGoogle emler-barr, A., Levy, H. : Spoofing prevention method. In: Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM (March 2005)Google, A. M., Usc/isi, D. M., Felix, S., Ucdavis, W., Ucla, L. Z., Wu, C. S. F. : On Design and Evaluation of “Intention-Driven” ICMP Traceback. In: Proceedings of IEEE ICCCN (October 2001)Google Scholar4. Ferguson, P., Senie, D. : Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source Address Spoofing. RFC 2827 (May 2000)Google fprobe (March 2011), 6., C., Wang, H., Shin, K. G. : Hop-count filtering: an effective defense against spoofed DDoS traffic. In: Proceedings of ACM CCS 2003 (October 2003)Google, J., Mirkovic, J., Ehrenkranz, T., Wang, M., Reiher, P., Zhang, L. : Learning the valid incoming direction of IP packets. Comput. Netw. 52(2), 399–417 (2008)zbMATHCrossRefGoogle, G. : Nmap Network Scanning. Insecure, USA (2008)Google, T., Leckie, C. : Adjusted Probabilistic Packet Marking for IP Traceback. In: Gregori, E., Conti, M., Campbell, A. T., Omidyar, G., Zukerman, M. (eds. ) NETWORKING 2002. LNCS, vol. 2345, pp. 697–708. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)Google, T., Leckie, C., Ramamohanarao, K. : Proactively detecting distributed denial of service attacks using source IP address monitoring. In: Mitrou, N. M., Kontovasilis, K., Rouskas, G. N., Iliadis, I., Merakos, L. ) NETWORKING 2004. LNCS, vol. 3042, pp. 771–782. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Google, S., Wetherall, D., Karlin, A., Anderson, T. : Practical network support for IP traceback. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 30(4), 295–306 (2000)CrossRefGoogle, Y., Bi, J., Wu, J., Liu, Q. : A two-level source address spoofing prevention based on automatic signature and verification mechanism. In: Computers and Communications, ISCC 2008, pp. 392–397 (July 2008)Google, D. X., Perrig, A. : Advanced and authenticated marking schemes for IP traceback. In: Proceedings of INFOCOM 2001, vol. 2 (April 2001)Google rayer, W. T., Jones, C. E., Tchakountio, F., Hain, R. R. : SPIE-IPv6: Single IPv6 Packet Traceback. In: Proceedings of LCN 2004, Washington, DC, USA (November 2004)Google Cymru Inc. : The bogon reference (April 2012),, H., Jin, C., Shin, K. : Defense against spoofed IP traffic using hop-count filtering. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 15(1) (February 2007)Google, L., Bi, J., Wu, J. : An authentication based source address spoofing prevention method deployed in iPv6 edge network. In: Shi, Y., van Albada, G. D., Dongarra, J., Sloot, P. M. A. ) ICCS 2007, Part IV. LNCS, vol. 4490, pp. 801–808. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar21. Zuquete, A. : Improving the functionality of SYN cookies. of IFIP TC6/TC11 Communications and Multimedia Security, pp. 57–77 (September 2002)Google ScholarCopyright information© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013Authors and AffiliationsMichal Kováčik1Michal Kajan1Martin Žádní4Innovations Centre of Excellence, Faculty of Information TechnologyBrno University of TechnologyBrnoCzech Republic2. CesnetPragueCzech Republic
Frequently Asked Questions about ip spoofing proxy
What is IP spoofing in cyber security?
Spoofing is a specific type of cyber-attack in which someone attempts to use a computer, device, or network to trick other computer networks by masquerading as a legitimate entity.
Can you spoof an IP address?
IP address spoofing, or IP spoofing, is the forging of a source IP address field in IP packets with the purpose of concealing the identity of the sender or impersonating another computing system. Fundamentally, source IP spoofing is possible because Internet global routing is based on the destination IP address.
Is IP spoofing and VPN same?
While VPNs are primarily used for the purpose of securing communications over the internet, IP Spoofing is often used for quite the opposite. Each packet of data sent over the internet has a specific destination address designating where it’s going and a source address designating where it’s coming from. …Jun 1, 2020