Display name spoofing is a very common technique used by cyber criminals to carry out phishing activities, that is, to recover valuable information to gain an advantage. Often this type of attack aims to obtain credit card numbers, bank account numbers or login credentials to some service.
The practice consists of sending mass emails using the name of trusted organizations and personalities. Since most email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird only display the sender's name and not the email address, the recipient may fall into the trap set by the hacker.
It is easy to run into situations where the sender's email address does not afghanistan phone number list logically correspond to the real name: if you receive mail from “ Mario Rossi di Banca Italia you can immediately guess that the email is not from Mr. Mario Rossi and, even more easily, that this figure is not an employee of this alleged bank.
Attackers can change their display name to that of another person, organization, or entity in order to mislead users who interact with them. Once the display name has been manipulated, other users may be fooled into making decisions based on incorrect information. For example, they may respond to a message thinking they are interacting with a different person, or they may be tricked into sharing sensitive information.
In case of doubt, the best thing to do is to view the source of the message and compare the consistency between the sender name and the Return-Path : if they differ, it means that the communication is not reliable.
Keeping the same example, if I read in the From “ Mario Rossi di Banca Italia ”, the correspondence would not be there, as the domains (bancaitalia.it and email555.com) are different.
How to protect yourself from display name spoofing?
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