What is an Impersonation Attack?

Cybersecurity is one of the essential requirements of today’s generation. Cybersecurity ensures that the safety of the computer network is maintained, and the computer system is not aimed as a potential target by any cyber attacker. Cyber attacks are extremely dangerous attacks that are executed with the objective of stealing, manipulating, or deleting authenticated user/ organizational data. Cyber attacks should be mitigated from the root so that users/organizations using internet services feel safe and secure while using them. Knowledge about cyber attacks thus plays an important role in educating cyber users about the different types of cyber-attacks and the preventive measures to deal with cyber attacks.

Key points:

• Impersonation Attack is another form of cyber attack which takes place with the malicious intent of stealing confidential information.
• Impersonation Attack revolves around the process where the cyber attackers don’t use malware or bot for committing the cybercrime, but rather make use of another strong tactic of social engineering.  
• The attacker researches and collects information about the legitimate user through a platform such as social media and then use this information to impersonate or pretend as the original legitimate user.  
•  Impersonation Attacks are threats to security because they involve immediate action which pressurizes to act without distinguishing between the authenticated user and impersonated user.

Principle:

• The nature of the Impersonation Attack is a very risky form of cyber attack as the original user who is impersonated has rights to private information. 
• Impersonation Attacks can take place by making use of resemblance to the original user identity, say e-mail IDs.
• E-mail IDs with a very minute difference from the legitimate user are used in this form of attack, making this other form of impersonation attack differ from the phishing cyber mechanism.
• The e-mail addresses are so similar and close to each other that without paying heed or attention to them, the difference can’t be easily noticed. 
  Also, the e-mail addresses appear to be correct, as they generally don’t have spelling errors.  

Prevention:

The following ways can help in the prevention of Impersonation Attacks:

• Proper security: The security mechanism helps in identifying malicious e-mails and thereby filter spamming e-mail addresses on regular basis.
• Double-checking sensitive information: Whenever important sensitive information or money-related data needs to be transferred also make sure that the data is transferred to a legitimate user by cross-checking the e-mail address.
• Ensuring organizational level security: Organizations should have specific domain names assigned to them, which can help organization employees/users to distinguish their identity from the cyber attackers.
• Protection of User Identity: Employees must not share their private identities, publicly, which can be used by the attackers to impersonate their presence in the organization.