CAPEC-195

Standard Abstraction Level
Meta — Very abstract, high-level category
Standard — Specific enough to understand
Detailed — Tied to specific technique
Draft MITRE CAPEC Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development
Incomplete — Partially defined
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CAPEC
Severity: Medium
Principal Spoof

Description

A Principal Spoof is a form of Identity Spoofing where an adversary pretends to be some other person in an interaction. This is often accomplished by crafting a message (either written, verbal, or visual) that appears to come from a person other than the adversary. Phishing and Pharming attacks often attempt to do this so that their attempts to gather sensitive information appear to come from a legitimate source. A Principal Spoof does not use stolen or spoofed authentication credentials, instead relying on the appearance and content of the message to reflect identity.

Prerequisites

The target must associate data or activities with a person's identity and the adversary must be able to modify this identity without detection.