Security

Have you ever faced the problem that some one is sending you emails from your own address ? If the answer is yes, you might be a victim of ’spoofing’ attack.

In the case of ’spoofing’ attack , three things can be happened to you.

• You’re receiving bounces for messages you never sent.

• There are messages in Spam from ‘me.’

• My Contacts say I sent spam to them, or I found suspicious access to my account.

Google gives a very good example of spoofing in it’s site. They say:

“When you send a letter through the post, you generally write a return address on the envelope so the recipient can identify the sender, and so the post office can return the mail to the sender in the event of a problem. But nothing prevents you from writing a different return address than your own; in fact, someone else could send a letter and put your return address on the envelope. Email works the same way. When a server sends an email message, it specifies the sender, but this sender field can be forged. If there is a problem with delivery and someone forged your address on the message, then the message will be returned to you, even if you weren’t the actual sender.”

Why they do that?

The spammers always seeking for different ways to gets others valuable information. Now-a-days most of the mail services can detect which mails are spams and which are not. So spammers take the chance that the mail might not be caught as spam if its send by your own mail address. But mail service providers now this trick of spammers, so they treat these kinds of mail as spams.

What to do ?

Actually you don’t have any option except just ignoring the mail. But you can report it to Federal Trade Commission about the spammers. So that they can take action against the original sender. First find the header of the mail. if you are using Gmail, Log in to Gmail, Open the message you’d like to view headers for, Click the down arrow next to Reply, at the top-right of the message pane. Now copy from the top of the page to the To: [your mail address] .Select Show original. If you are using Yahoo mail, open that email click on “Action” Then click on “Full Header”, copy all content of the new window. Now write an email to spam@uce.gov and say them you have got a mail from your own address and then paste the header of the mail (that you copied just a steps before).

If you have a feeling that, someone really sending mails using your mail account take some real actions , like changing all your passwords and security questions , etc. or read this article.

Resource:
Gmail Help Center.
Wikipedia.