A spoofed packet is an Internet Protocol packet created from a spoofed or fake IP address but is impersonating to be a legitimate and authentic sender.
The spoofed packet is normally a request generated by a client node for the server or another computer.
The basic purpose of using spoofed packets is to hide the true identity of the sender.
Creating a spoofed packet is not the actual technique, the real task is to accomplish IP spoofing, that is creating a fake IP address that does not actually belong to any of the computers on the Internet currently. The spoofed packet is the data that is sent from that anonymous and fake IP address.
Spoofed packets are primarily used in denial of service attacks and are also used as a backup or secondary option in distributed denial of service attacks where the attackers want to overwhelm the server or target website with requests without giving their true identity or IP address.
Spoofed packets are created by modifying the information about the source address in the header section of an IP packet. After modifying the numerical value and source address the attacker successfully creates a spoofed packet that appears as if it was sent from a different machine.
The server that received the spoofed packet will send the response back to the altered address and in this way, an attacker would not only stay hidden but would also be able to use full uplink and download bandwidth of his computer.
Spoofed packets are also used to defeat the security mechanism of a network and bypass services that are based upon IP authentication. The best protection and defense against spoofed packets is packet filtering.