ARP Poisoning: What Is It and How to Prevent?

ARP poisoning, also known as ARP spoofing or ARP poison routing is a cyber attack carried out over a Local Area Network (LAN) that sends malicious ARP protocol packets to a default gateway on a LAN. In other words, it a is a Man in the Middle (MitM) attack that allows attackers to intercept communication between network devices. Once the ARP packets have left the source network, attackers can receive data or remain undetected.

ARP protocol is used by most machines on a local computer network to communicate with each other. When an ARP poisoning attack is executed, the attacker sends out a fake ARP request causing all devices connected on the target LAN to update their routing tables and associate the attacker’s machine and attacker’s mac address as the default gateway. When the user tries to access an internet address, they will get redirected to the device that belongs to the attacker and then serve them with falsified ARP messages.

While people often confuse ARP poisoning or spoofing and IP address spoofing, they differ in meaning and purpose. The former means stealing someone else’s Media Access Control (MAC) address; the latter refers to the practice of corrupting the ARP table. These two terms are both sub-elements of cyberattacks on Internet protocol (IP) and MAC addresses.

ARP Spoofing attacks occur when the attacker pretends to be another entity, such as a person or a business, to commit a crime. The technological implementation of ARP spoofing involves websites, phone calls, and emails, or more sophisticated approaches like DNS cache poisoning, causing conflicting source IP addresses, or Address Resolution Protocol ARP corruption.

The main goals of ARP poisoning are to illegally acquire confidential data, steal money, spread malware, bypass wireless networks’ security through malicious links or attachments, or redirect network traffic to perform denial-of-service attacks. Cybercriminals often employ spoofing attacks to obtain critical information to launch more significant attacks, such as a man-in-the-middle attack or an advanced persistent threat. Hackers attempt ARP spoofing through every online communication channel to steal data, an individual’s identity and assets.

How to Detect an ARP Cache Poisoning Attack

It is possible to check your ARP table to detect potential attacks by entering the following command line: “arp -a” on both Windows and Linux. This table will display both internet address and physical address columns (mapping of IP and MAC addresses). If there are multiple IP addresses with the same MAC address, you might be the victim of an ARP spoof attack.

One of the reasons why ARP cache poisoning attacks and ARP spoofing attacks are so dangerous is because they often serve as the launching pad for more advanced ARP attacks. Many ARP attack and ARP spoofing prevention strategies, including packet filtering, using static ARP entries and cache, and IPv6, have limited success. MAC address filtering can block traffic coming from certain machines or devices. But MAC spoofing can be easily done in many operating systems, so any device could pretend to have a unique MAC address.

Once a cybercriminal executes a successful ARP poisoning attack (ARP spoofing attack), they can then efficiently perform several attacks, including but not limited to:

DDoS attack (distributed denial of service attacks): This is an attempt to overload a server with traffic so that it cannot function properly. An attacker can use a given IP address of the server they want to attack to perform a DDoS attack. With enough repeated successful ARP spoofing attacks, the victim will be flooded with ARP traffic.

Session hijacking attacks: Occur when a hacker uses ARP spoofing tool to gain network access, allowing them to steal your session IDs. They can then use that stolen session ID to access accounts that you’re logged into. To prevent ARP poisoning attacks, you can use a high-quality virtual private network that will mask your IP address and keep your online activity private and secure. A VPN is an encrypted tunnel that largely blocks your activity from ARP poisoning hackers. You can also define a static ARP entry for an IP address and prevent devices from listening on ARP responses.

Man-in-the-middle attacks: Involves altering communications between two parties to appear to be communicating. Hackers can intercept and manipulate web traffic and even push malware to a network device and into a victim’s computer.

Email Hijacking

Cybercriminals use ARP poisoning attacks to take control of the email accounts of banks, financial institutions, or other companies. Attackers can monitor transactions and correspondence between the bank and its customers.

Attackers can spoof the bank’s email address and send customers emails instructing them to resend their credentials to an account controlled by the attackers.

Prevent ARP Spoofing Using Email Security To SafeGuard End-To-End Communications

ARP poisoning impacts organizations’ local network users. Hackers use ARP poisoning to corrupt the cache table and spoofing to hijack network connections. While stopping ARP poisoning attacks, including a man-in-the-middle, often is very challenging for SecOPs and NetOps teams, email encryption is a safeguard for end-to-end communications. Using One-Click Compliance and encryption from Trustifi, the sending user can encrypt the email first before leaving the secure gateway.

When the message is delivered to the destination, even if an ARP cache impersonation or session hijacking, the payload of the email is still encrypted and unreadable by the impostor.

Email Encryption Solution From Trustifi

Businesses frequently suffer from cybersecurity threats, making it challenging to keep their financial data, customers, suppliers, or employees safe. Trustifi’s One-Click encryption software offers the first genuinely seamless end-to-end platform. Until now, products that encrypt emails have always been challenging to set up, understand, and use. Alongside this difficulty, standard methods require both the sender and recipient to exchange or share an encryption key and a corresponding decryption key for adequate data protection. Trustifi’s simple software solution makes email security and file sharing convenient and easy.

In contrast to other available methods, Trustifi’s revolutionary One-Click Encryption allows end-users to easily send, receive, and open encrypted data within emails. Trustifi’s ease of use, combined with its advanced security features, assures that every email sent and received is protected every time you use their email encryption software. Enabling Trustifi’s solutions can help mitigate ARP poisoning or ARP spoofing attacks.

Core Benefits Of Encrypting Your Email

Trustifi’s email security platform with One-Click Encryption is the easiest way to send and receive encrypted messages. If privacy is an essential concern to you, you’ll understand how vital it is to protect sensitive data in transit. Trustifi utilized advanced encryption for every email sent and received on the platform, providing access to encryption technology that directly integrates into a company’s preferred email provider.

Trustifi MFA Methods For Recipient Authentication

By enabling multi-factor authentication, you will ensure that emails are kept fully secure and can only be accessed by their intended recipients. Senders can encrypt emails with just a simple click of a button.

Recipients can securely and easily access encrypted emails in their inbox after verifying their identity with an additional authentication factor without creating new accounts or logging into any third-party systems. This makes encryption much more accessible, so users are far more likely to use it.

Many Methods To Verify The Identity Of The Email Recipient:

– PIN code sent via SMS or as a phone call

– Personal password

– PIN code sent via email

– Utilizing the recipient’s Single Sign-On (SSO) with Gmail, O365, or Yahoo

Core Benefits

The main benefit of two-factor authentication is that it verifies the recipient. It does no good to go to great lengths to protect the contents of a message only to have it accessed by the wrong person. Trustifi’s two-factor authentication feature offers another layer of security to ensure that the intended recipient opens every email.

Trustifi Tracking & Postmark Proof

Trustifi’s Postmark Proof & Tracking offers the first truly viable alternative to Certified Mail and revolutionizes how sensitive data is sent and tracked via email. Trustifi’s Postmark Proof & Tracking feature gives the sender a full-field view of email delivery confirmation, receipt of when it was opened, and what device it was opened on – all in real-time. With immediate notifications, senders never miss when an email containing sensitive information is delivered and opened.

In addition to providing a receipt of comprehensive tracking information, Trustifi’s Postmark Proof & Tracking offers many more features that provide your organization with an added level of assurance that emails containing sensitive information are protected.

Core Benefits

The entire audit history on sent emails may not always provide the data type to leverage. For this type of data, the sender or administrator will need to tap into Trustifi’s analytics capabilities that provide complete visibility into how many times emails are clicked on, forwarded, opened, printed, and more. The data can then inform business decisions, alter email campaigns, or explore new opportunities.

ARP Poisoning Protection: Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.

Culture

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, easily configurable Data Loss Prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SecOps make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, sensitive data protection, and message encryption.