Spoofing : Identity Crisis

Should “spoofing” be a part of Pakistan’s cyber crime law? Why or why not ?

Who steals my purse steals trash... / But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed. --William Shakespeare


The word "spoof" means to deceive or to falsify.

Spoofing is hiding or masking your identity. Making a person believe that you are someone else and so gaining access to his/her belongings or personal information.

In technical terms, Spoofing is the creation of TCP/IP packets using somebody else's IP address. Routers use the "destination IP" address in order to forward packets through the Internet, but ignore the "source IP" address. That address is only used by the destination machine when it responds back to the source.


Spoofing is of many types. Some important ones are :

URL spoofing also known as the phishing . In this a replica of a website is made on another server under the attackers control. The intent is to get peoples user names and passwords or other personal information by making them believe that this is a trusted website such as bank’s website or chat forum’s website.

E-mail spoofing is the forgery of an e-mail header so that the message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source.
This technique is mainly used by spammers to hide the origin of their e-mails.
We can take the example of our universities mail box. When it was shifted to mail.nu.edu.pk people sent e-mails to students which showed that they were from the administration.

Daily Life Spoofs
flowers.com (now 1-800-FLOWERS.COM). A student used the company's address in spam selling information on "free cash grants." Bounces and return-to-sender hate mail swamped flowers.com 's network and crashed its system.

Sony. A message "from" Sony's president threatening a hostile takeover of Apple Computer at an inflated per-share price landed at tech and finance companies from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.

Herbert Smith (law firm). An icily worded message "from" management informed employees a colleague had been brutally murdered, naming her replacement. Shocked staff forwarded the message to friends outside the company's London and Hong Kong offices. A viral global smear campaign rapidly unfurled. Microsoft. An attachment in a message "from" Microsoft was purported to be a software update. Those who clicked succumbed to the virus the "update" really was.



As people of our country are gaining knowledge or are becoming learned some have become criminals. We previously believed that criminals are illiterate but now electronic education has provided a new way to crime “cyber crime”. Many are attracted as this is relatively easy than walking straight in the bank with weapons or steeling and snatching.
Spoofing is a way to cyber crime. Criminals have long employed the tactic of masking their true identity, from disguises to aliases to caller-id blocking. It should come as no surprise then, that criminals who conduct their activities on networks and computers should employ such techniques.
Spoofing is a global problem which has affected many people financialy , etc.
So for the betterment of our country and its citizens “spoofing” should be a part of cyber crime law and severe punishments should be given to these cyber criminals so as this might reduce it.




Help/Guidance
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