Note that Gmail, even with its aggressive spam filtering, did not put this spoofed message in the spam folder, even though the spoofed address was a Gmail address, and this spoofed email did not actually originate from Gmail. Here is an example of that same spoofed email as it hits Gmail: My own email program did the rest.Īnd so will your company’s. All the sender had to do was to go to a site that allows you to send spoofed email, and spoof the “From” address of a sender in my contacts. The spoofed emails are indistinguishable from the real ones. So if you believe in the authenticity, veracity, and security of your email based on seeing your friend’s or colleague’s smiling face attached to that email, you are ripe for being scammed this way. Your email program will display the “sender’s” image and name to you – soft-verifying who it is from (even if it isn’t) – based only on the email address that it finds in the “From” field. Let us repeat that, because it’s extremely important:
They relied on the fact that so many email systems now display the contact’s avatar or icon in the email, based on the sending email address alone, which is in the recipient’s contact program or list of contacts – and, which can be very easily spoofed, tricking the programs. That’s exactly the point of this article. So, how did those scammers manage to insert Medidata’s president’s image in their spoofed email – let alone the correct image? It was only because one of them thought that there was something fishy about the reply-to address of a subsequent email that they didn’t send a second wire transfer! There is no doubt at all that the fact that the emails carried that reassuring image of the president’s face, along with his name and email address, in the “From” field, lulled the accounts payable clerk, and the company officers, to never even imagine for a moment that the email did not originate from the president. That’s four million, seven hundred seventy thousand, two hundred twenty six dollars. This fairly simple scam led to Medidata wire transferring $4,770,226.00 to the scammers. This email also contained the president’s name, email address, and picture next to his name in the “From” field. Next several executive officers of Medidata received a group email “from” Medidata’s president. The email contained the president’s name, his email address, and picture in the “From” field. Medidata happens to use Google apps to process their mail, but this could have happened regardless of what system they used.Ī scammer spoofing Medidata’s president’s email address sent an email to a clerk in Medidata’s accounts payable department.
This is exactly what happened to a company called Medidata, leading to them send over $4,000,000 to a scammer who was posing as the president of the company by simply spoofing the president’s email address. The combination of these familiar images demonstrating who the email is supposedly from, combined with the ease of spoofing, makes it very easy for a scammer to use social engineering to have the recipient take some action at the request of the scammer, as the recipient automatically believes it’s the person represented in the image and name. So, how easy is it to spoof email? The real-life example above took the spoofing sender (someone on our staff) less than five minutes, from start to finish – including the time that it took to search for and find an email spoofing service. Spoofing Email: The act of sending an email that appears to be from someone else.
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