Countermeasure Against Spoofed E-mails Using Display Name as a User Authenticator

As everyone uses emails for business, email is one of popular communication channels that attackers choose to launch malicious activities such as spam mails and spoofed mails. Until now, spam emails have been decreased after the taking down of tons of botnets. On the other hand, the use of spoofed emails is increasing. Most of display names in spoofed emails are spoofed to a legitimate source, and they are used as phishing tools to obtain the confidential information from victims. Therefore, in this research we propose and implement a mechanism on the message submission agent (MSA) to check and verify the display name of submitted emails. With our proposed method, spam mails and phishing mails with spoofed display name can be detected before sending an email to the destination; and the number of spoofed mails will be decreased. We implement our proposed method on Ubuntu operating system with Postfix mail server. The experiment results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed system. However, the performance measured from the average transmission time increases according to the percentage of spoofed mails.