Spoofing A spoofing attack is an attempt to masquerade as someone else. There are a variety of spoofing attacks, including: Wolf in sheep's clothing Spoofing email messages to trick the recipient to accept an email from an attacker Creating fake logon programs that attempt to capture user ID and password Spoofing IP addresses to make it appear to come from a trusted source DNS spoofing involves an attempt to populate a name server database with false information. This can result in a user being sent to a website other than the one intended Spoofing is making data appear to come from someone or somewhere other than where it originated by maliciously modifying TCP/IP source information. The goal of spoofing attacks is to gain illegitimate access to a resource. A number of the TCP/IP protocols (DNS, IP, ARP, ICMP, SMTP, NTP, etc.) are vulnerable to spoofing attacks as they were not designed with authentication as a core feature. As such,