Email Spoofing is the forgery of an email header so that the message appears to have originated from the actual source. Email spoofing is very common nowadays, and 96% of social engineering attacks are carried through email spoofing. Email spoofing involves change of the source email address, sender's name & sender's profile pic. The spoofed email looks very legitimate because the email address, profile picture & sender's name is same as the original email.
The only way to detect a spoofed email is to check the signature of the email.
Click on the down arrow to see the details of the mail.
At the last you will see "mailed-by", "mailed-by" shows the signature of the email.
Now to verify the signature of the mail, compare the signature with the original signature.
If the original signature matches with the received mail, then the mail isn't spoofed, and if the signature doesn't match, then the mail is spoofed.
There is an easy way to verify emails coming from a Gmail user, instead of matching the signature with the original signature, check that whether the mail is signed by "gmail.com" or not because all emails sent using Gmail are signed by "gmail.com".
So now that we have learnt how to verify emails coming from normal people/friends, it's the time to verify business/commercial emails.
Verifying a commercial email is a bit different, because we do not have the original signature nor it is signed by gmail.
Every commercial mail is signed by the original website of the company/organisation, for instance, a mail sent by Github will be signed by "github.com".
And if the email isn't signed by the original website, then the email is spoofed.
Note: Always verify an email before replying or clicking on something.
