ITPEC FE Morning October 2018 Question 38

Masquerading as someone else — spoofing means pretending to be a trusted person or system to gain access or information.

An attacker who poses as a superior, a member of the information systems department or a customer exploits the victim's trust in that identity to obtain passwords or other data. The same idea covers technical spoofing: forged sender e-mail addresses, IP addresses or caller IDs.

Answer (c)

Why not others:

• •(a) — encrypting the victim's data and demanding a ransom is ransomware
• •(b) — watching someone's keyboard as they type a password is shoulder hacking (shoulder surfing)
• •(d) — flooding a computer with requests from many machines to overload it is a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack

Key rule: Spoofing attacks identity: the attacker is believed to be someone they are not, whether a person, an address or a server.

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