CAPEC-195: 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.
- Likelihood of attack
- Not rated by MITRE
- Typical severity
- Medium
- Abstraction
- StandardA specific methodology or technique used in an attack.
Mechanism of attack: Engage in Deceptive Interactions
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.
Mitigations
CAPEC 3.9 lists no mitigation for this pattern; see its child patterns or related weaknesses.
Related weaknesses (CWE)
CAPEC 3.9 links no CWE weakness to this pattern.