US Senate IP Caught Defacing Edward Snowden's Wikipedia Entry

[TampaAnimusVortex]

113. Not really in this case...

Faking an IP is easy. Faking an authenticated remote TCP session is slightly more complex.

The user was authenticated with Wikipedia, which means the session required a two way communication with the server - not one way.
That means the traffic had to get back to the client.
This means at best, the IP address could have been spoofed from someone along the path of travel - most likely someone on the same VLAN as the client.
Even if it was spoofed from the local vlan, (assuming a real local client - because otherwise whats the point?) the local client would almost certainly also receive the return packets and in response to the unknown spoofed session, kick out some reset packets to close the unknown session - thereby terminating the session with the server and the spoofer would get shut out anyways.

It's highly unlikely that just any old random hacker on the internet could just spoof this from his remote site without taking over some component of the traffic pathway. I also doubt that Senate security wouldn't detect someone spoofing IPs on their VLANs as it's a pretty basic signature to detect on just about every intrusion detection system around.