One approach to this attack entails the adversary altering a maliciously modified resource's metadata in order to hide their malicious activity. Another approach involves altering the metadata of an adversary-created resource to make the source appear more credible. Adversaries may spoof a variety of metadata across a number of resources, such as the following:

• Authors of Version Control System (VCS) repository commits
• Open source package statistics
• File attributes, such as when a file was last update

• The ultimate goal of a Metadata Spoofing attack is to trick victims into believing the malicious resource being provided originates from a reputable source. However, the victim instead leverages the malicious resource, which could result in a number of negative technical impacts.