In
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...
, message forgery is sending a message so to deceive the recipient about the actual sender's identity. A common example is sending a
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
or prank e-mail as if it were originated from an
address other than the one which was really used.
Notable Incidents
2014 Sony Pictures hack
On November 2014, the multinational entertainment studio,
Sony Pictures
Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment studio conglomerate that produces, acquires, and distributes filmed entertainment (theatrical motion pictures, television programs, and rec ...
, suffered a huge
data leak
A data breach, also known as data leakage, is "the unauthorized exposure, disclosure, or loss of personal information".
Attackers have a variety of motives, from financial gain to political activism, political repression, and espionage. There a ...
; over 100 terabytes of confidential company activities were exposed, resulting in well over $100 million lost.
One of the causes of the hack was through the use of message forgery. The
phishers gained entry by manipulating the recipient to open the malicious attachments contained in the emails that were posing as colleagues of the top-level employees within the company.
See also
*
Phishing
Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...
*
Message authentication code
In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as an authentication tag, is a short piece of information used for authentication, authenticating and Data integrity, integrity-checking a message. In other words, it is used t ...
*
Stream cipher attack
Stream ciphers, where plaintext bits are combined with a cipher bit stream by an exclusive-or operation (xor), can be very secure if used properly. However, they are vulnerable to attacks if certain precautions are not followed:
*keys must never ...
References
{{crypto-stub
Cryptographic attacks
Practical jokes