Content Spoofing

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What Does Content Spoofing Mean?

Content spoofing is a hacking technique used to lure a user on to a website that looks legitimate, but is actually an elaborate copy. Hackers looking to spoof content use dynamic HTML and frames to create a website with the expected URL and a similar appearance, and then prompts the user for personal information. Content spoofing is also common with email alerts, account notifications and so on.

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Techopedia Explains Content Spoofing

A hacker can design a web page very similar to that of any legitimate website and then use that facade to collect the information that users usually input into that page. This can be relatively harmless data such as an email address or the username and password for that particular site. However, content spoofing can dupe people into revealing more sensitive information like bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, birth dates, credit card numbers, mailing addresses and so on.

Content spoofing by itself is not inherently harmful, but the identity theft that may follow can be devastating and difficult to reverse. The best way to avoid these false websites is to question even seemingly legitimate emails from trusted sites.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.