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.