Читать книгу Cybersecurity For Dummies - Joseph Steinberg - Страница 41

One of the great dangers that the Internet creates is the ease with which mischievous parties can impersonate others. Prior to the Internet era, for example, criminals could not easily impersonate a bank or a store and convince people to hand over their money in exchange for some promised rate of interest or goods. Physically mailed letters and later telephone calls became the tools of scammers, but none of those earlier communication techniques ever came close to the power of the Internet to aid criminals attempting to impersonate law-abiding parties.

Creating a website that mimics the website of a bank, store, or government agency is quite simple and can sometimes be done within minutes. Criminals can find a near-endless supply of domain names that are close enough to those of legitimate parties to trick some folks into believing that a site that they are seeing is the real deal when it’s not, giving crooks the typical first ingredient in the recipe for online impersonation.

Sending an email that appears to have come from someone else is simple and allows criminals to perpetrate all sorts of crimes online. I myself demonstrated over 20 years ago how I could defeat various defenses and send an email that was delivered to recipients on a secure system — the message appeared to readers to have been sent from god@heaven.sky.