How DMARC can assist in the prevention of malicious email attacks

How DMARC can assist in the prevention of malicious email attacks

DMARC is a widely-adopted email security standard that helps prevent malicious email attacks. Used by over 80% of the world's largest brands, it provides stronger protection against rogue email and limits the spread of fraudulent emails. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) standardizes and backs up reporting on email authentication and content. It offers a simple, flexible, low-cost method for achieving broad interoperability of different email authentication systems and technologies as well as insight into the email sending practices of your own domains. From the moment DMARC was released, organizations wanted to know why they should adopt it. In this session, you'll get an introduction to the concepts behind DMARC and then dive deep into what it is, what it isn't and how it can be used for your specific organization.

The case for DMARC Email fraud destroys brand reputation and consumer trust while costing organizations billions of dollars, elevating email fraud to a board-level conversation. Low volume, highly targeted business email compromise (BEC) and email account compromise (EAC) scams are the most dangerous—even more costly than ransomware.

The Digital Marketing email ecosystem is under siege. Cyber-criminals have found innovative ways to monetize and maximize their return on investment through email fraud, (BEC) business email compromise and (EAC) email account compromise scams. From a consumer perspective, these fraudulent

emails are confusing and craftily designed to manipulate and deceive.

Fraudsters steal millions of dollars every year through BEC and EACs.

Read Also: What is Business Email Compromise (BEC)?

This white paper explores how applying DMARC to your organization's email infrastructure can significantly lower exposure to both impersonation and account compromise attacks, and the benefits of the new DMARC policy assertions to aid reporting. Effective BEC strategies require a combination of technical, operational and human processes using a layered approach. DMARC is the most important of these technical layers, blocking all spoofed emails from reaching your customers, employees and partners. Domain spoofing is one of the methods used by attackers to get an email delivered to a user’s inbox instead of their spam folder. It takes specialized expertise to parse email headers and figure out if mail was spoofed. The easy solution is to adopt DMARC, which allows you to use your own domain as a security measure.

DMARC adoption today DMARC adoption has continued to grow over the last decade. As of December 2020, 23% of sending domains reject unauthenticated mail, while another 11% of sending domains send mail to quarantine, according to Farsight data published on DMARC. While this data represents continued implementation growth, it also means nearly 80% of domains are still not rejecting unauthenticated mail. For the last decade, DMARC has been available as an option for email protection. In the last year, more than a million domains have adopted DMARC. DMARC hazards Organizations choosing to navigate the DMARC journey—without outside assistance—using internal resources need not stumble without proper tools.

To avoid doing this, there are a few hands-off tools you can use as well as some tips. This research brief will help you get started on a successful DMARC journey. It describes common pitfalls as well as important prerequisite steps.

It then presents a six-step checklist to build a data management system and stay on the DMARC journey. Finally, it provides tools and references to help organizations stay on track.

As the security teams decides whether or not to deploy DMARC to protect its trusted domains, there are several potential hazards team members should know about:

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The high risk of blocking legitimate mail.

DMARC requires extensive expertise.

How to store, render, and analyze large data sets.

A process for identifying and contacting stakeholders.

Ongoing support and management.

Take the DMARC journey Our experts will discuss the continued threats of email fraud and explain why it is essential to implement and enforce a robust, company-wide email authentication policy. Email fraud has become a 360-degree problem, as criminals can leverage multiple identity deception tactics to target various stakeholders involved with an organization. This tends to include their employees, customers, and business partners, so mitigating these potential hazards should become a high priority. Consider these four steps to kick off your journey:  Select a domain. Consider a sub domain vs. primary domain to get started.  Enable monitoring. Set the mail receiver policy to “none.”  Add the DMARC Record to DNS. Use the organization’s standard DNS addition process.  Receive and analyze domain reports. Starting with one domain will reduce the noise.

DMARC provides a powerful benefit to a customer’s messaging ecosystem. As with any complex technology, it’s necessary to start small and plan the

implementation in phases. The Take the Best DMARC Solutions Journey customer retention plan includes instructions for starting your journey toward a fraud-free messaging ecosystem. Resources are available for defining objectives, identifying resources, creating and executing a plan, putting in place a monitoring strategy, and more. Ensuring that an organization’s email infrastructure is properly configured to reject or quarantine messages based on DMARC policy will reduce the volume of spam and phishing emails received by employees. The email fraud landscape is changing. In order to dramatically reduce the number of fraudulent emails sent to consumers, businesses and government organizations, DMARC provides a critical system for validating that messages are authentic.