So to begin, what exactly is spoofing? This frequently used term is a malicious practice in which communication is disguised as a known source that is, in actuality, sent from an unknown source. The most common type of spoofing attack is email spoofing in which the email header appears to be from a familiar source other than the actual source.
Now the question becomes why is spoofing dangerous? You may be thinking to yourself that it is hard for someone to fool you. However, what if you find yourself in a situation where you receive spoofing emails from your boss asking you to change payment location? Or what if you receive emails from common shopping websites that ask you to submit sensitive, private information? The two situations discussed above are all common forms of spoofing attacks that extracts important information from victims who fall for the trick. And this is why you should care about spoofing prevention.
The real question now is how to prevent spoofing attacks? Thankfully, there are many solutions. On GMail, you can set up a SPF record,which identifies which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. For instructions on how to set up your SPF record, click here. You can also use DKIM to add a digital signature to outgoing message headers to verify that the message is safe and does come from your domain. To set this up, you just need to generate the public domain key for your domain and add the key to your domain’s DNS records and turn on email signing to start the DKIM header. For detailed instructions and guidance on the setup, click here. After installing both SPF and DKIM, you can also set up DMARC, which will allow domain administrators further control over the types of spam messages received on GMail and control over how GMail treats unauthenticated emails. For instructions on how to set up DMARC, click here.
With all these methods of prevention, the probability of your domain receiving spoofing emails will be greatly reduced. So take action now!