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Use Your Head(er)

E-mail spoofing can affect lawyers on two levels

By now, nearly everyone has at least seen examples of e-mail spoofing, while many have been made a victim of the sneaky tactic themselves.

Spoofing involves using someone else’s e-mail address to make a fraudulent message appear to come from someone the recipient knows or another legitimate source.

The trick is relatively easy to accomplish, and lawyers may increasingly find themselves involved in cases where falsified e-mail is presented as evidence. For this reason, in any case where e-mail transmissions are central to the potential outcome, relying solely on paper can be perilous.

At the ABA Techshow in Chicago in March, presenters Sharon Nelson and John Simek of Sensei Enterprises (www.senseient.com) outlined two types of cases that are most likely to involve e-mail spoofing:

• Custody battles: the bitter ex-spouse spoofs the e-mail of a former loved one, to try and prove that they wrote hateful or threatening messages, thereby weakening their position in the fight for custody.
  
  
• Employment disputes: the angry supervisor, looking for a reason to fire an employee, uses spoofing to pretend to have received threatening e-mail from that employee, thereby laying the groundwork for termination.

Law firms are also at risk of being embarrassed by spammers who send contacts and clients fraudulent e-mail using the firm’s domain name. Worse yet, because the culprits often operate from foreign countries and have little incentive to conform to Canadian law, there’s not much spoofing victims can do besides hope that the spammer moves on to another unsuspecting victim.

So how to tell whether an e-mail is authentic or spoofed? The answer is in the e-mail header, which stores information such as the sender, recipient, message ID number, routing (server) information and more. To view header data in Outlook, open the message, select “View” and then “Options”.

Several software tools are available to help non-techies make sense of e-mail header data. The most popular, Sam Spade (samspade.org), comes in the form of a freely available web service or a windows application providing local access to similar utilities.

—Mark Kuiack

Neither the author nor the CBA should be construed as endorsing any product or website listed in this article. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CBA. In this document, any reference to "jurist" or "lawyer" includes, where appropriate, "Québec notary".