Google, in their recent security blog has confirmed that they are all set to take their email security to next level by rolling out Gmail’s general support of BIMI, an industry standard that aims to drive adoption of strong sender authentication for the entire email ecosystem.
Almost an year after they first announcing the adoption Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) pilot , this roll out is going to be next big step in email security. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience by displaying the Brand logos as an icon next to email senders’ names, on every email they send.
BIMI facilitates advantages to the entire email ecosystem. By requiring strong authentication, both users and email security systems can improve trust in the source of emails, and senders will be able to boost their brand trust and provide an enhanced immersive experience to their customers.
With Google announcing their BIMI support, the community has got even bigger with other industry leading mail service providers like Yahoo(Verizon Media), Fastmail and now Google.
According to the standard to adopt BIMI for a mail domain, it must first be secured by DMARC in Quarantine/Reject policy. This would ensure the logo are not being displayed on any unauthenticated email.
How does DMARC help?
To explain in short, DMARC – developed in 2012, is a protocol that uses both SPF and DKIM authentication to secure email, and additionally has a mechanism that sends the domain owner a report whenever an email fails DMARC validation. This means the domain owner is notified whenever an email sent by an unauthorized third party.
Every new invention brings its new challenges. Every new challenge pushes us to find a new way to overcome it. DMARC has been around for some years now, still phishing has existed for much longer. As new organizations are born each day, email security is important and plays a vital role in every organization and there should be necessary actions taken to make sure there is no security breach. It becomes the responsibility of every business to protect themselves, their clientsb and employeesb sensitive personal information.
At ProDMARC, we’re here to help you meet this new challenge with ease.! ProDMARC as a product built on a mission to achieve a secure and spoofing free email channels across all of internet space; makes reporting of DMARC, providing volumes and trends of the outbound mails including that of phishing campaigns and yield confirmation for reliability of the outbound mails in terms of SPF, DKIM & DMARC conformance; smooth and uncomplicated.
Summarizing, ProDMARC helps improve customer and third party trust in email communications.
Considering the economy being in slump, ProDMARC announces a limited-time offer during the ongoing pandemic – 15 days of DMARC health assessment report, completely free for all organizations who wish to gain visibility of the mail based phishing threats which are at an all-time high.
Sign up for your 15 day ProDMARC trial by writing to us on info@progist.net.
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Since the early days of the internet, spam has been a persistent and chronic problem. Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) sent the first unsolicited mass e-mailing (later dubbed SPAM) on May 1, 1978, advertising the VAX T-series to 400 of the then 2600 ARPAnet users.
The SMTP email protocol, which we still use today, evolved from these early ARPANET mail protocols (Postel RFC788 and RFC821) in the early 1980s, and has changed very little since then. The SMTP protocol has had little to no security built in since its introduction, and when used to send email, it offers little defense against spoofing of email addresses or servers. However, several new tools have recently been added to the email security arsenal to protect against these threats.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are all similar features for detecting spoofed or spam emails, but they vary slightly.
SPF (RFC 7208)
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) specifies a list of servers that are permitted to send email for a particular domain using a DNS entry. Its security is based on the fact that only authorized domain administrators have access to the DNS zone records for the domain.
DKIM (RFC 6376)
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) differs from SPF in that it verifies that the receiving server is allowed to send mail for the domain and that the quality of the mail has not changed since it was sent. Using DKIM keys stored in DNS and DKIM uses a public/private key signing mechanism.
The following steps are applied to the email process with DKIM:
Sending servers create a signature with their DKIM private key and insert it into the email header (DKIM-Signature).
Email recipients look up the DKIM public key in the sending domain’s DNS TXT record, which is then used to verify the DKIM-Signature attached to the email.
If the email body content is modified, the email signature will no longer match and validation will fail.
This process verifies that the email content has not been tampered with, as well as that the email was sent from a domain-approved server.
DMARC (RFC 7489)
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) incorporates elements of both SPF and DKIM by stating a simple DMARC policy that can be used in both tools, as well as allowing the domain administrator to set an address that can be used to submit information about forged mail message statistics gathered by receivers against the same domain, for example:
Relative levels of spoofing of your domain(s).
Who is spoofing email purporting to be from your domain?
Does that mean your spam problem is resolved?
In an ideal world, all email servers would use these techniques, and SPAM would be significantly reduced. However, since making a mistake in configuring the necessary DNS TXT records can result in the loss of important emails, some domain owners have been hesitant to implement the methods.
Despite this, major email domain owners such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have implemented these approaches.
SPAM can still be transmitted via compromised accounts and servers, shared hosting email servers, and misconfigured servers, so multilevel email protection is the only way to ensure a clean and safe email feed.
How effective are DMARC, SPF, and DKIM?
These tools will undoubtedly have a significant effect on the fight against SPAM, and the more domains that use them, the better. However, caution should be exercised during DMARC implementation to ensure that all settings are right before going live. SPF, for example, allows you to set the changes in a test mode, which means that recipient domains will not block any mail that fails the test.
Wrapping Up
ProgIST believes in protecting both your and your clients’ email rights and privacy. ProDMARC helps you implement DMARC authentication to stop fraudsters from misusing your domain. Get Started with top-class cybersecurity solutions for your business at ProgIST.
It is a well-known fact that in most of the cyber-frauds, the cyber criminals impersonate trusted identities, mainly because the chances of the victim falling for such emails are high. These attacks are commonly called as email spoofing.
Let us look at some quick facts about email spoofing attacks:
Over 70% of fraudulent emails are directly sent from a domain name of the victim organisation.
According to a latest email security risk assessment, there is a surge in email spoofing attacks by over 22% as compared to previous quarter.
These attack types are highly sophisticated and it requires us to take a multi-layered approach to detect and stop such attacks
Types of Impersonation Attacks
The email spoofing attacks most commonly used for targeting the dependent parties of the organisation like their customers, partners and associates. The victims might be able to differentiate such emails from legitimate emails and might fall for such attacks
Another major attack exploiting identity theft is CEO/CFO frauds. Here the employees are tricked to make payments to fraudsters account or share confidential information of the organisation.
Why DMARC?
The only way to protect your dependent parties from falling for such attacks is to protect your mailing domain with Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) security control. It works by prohibiting anybody except expressly approved senders from using an organization’s domain (including internal and third-party mailing systems) to send an email. Additionally, DMARC reports also helps you to identify and appropriately configure all your legitimate email senders and also to visualize the threat targeting the organisation’s domain.
How does ProDMARC help you in DMARC journey?
ProDMARC is built on a mission to achieve a secure and spoofing free email channels across all of internet space; makes reporting of DMARC, providing volumes and trends of the outbound mails including that of phishing campaigns and yield confirmation for reliability of the outbound mails in terms of SPF, DKIM & DMARC conformance; smooth and uncomplicated. It helps in gaining visibility on your email domain getting used on your behalf by third parties. It’s important to gain visibility of unauthorized emails which might be getting sent from your brand; ensures that emails do not get blocked due to misconfigurations, making the best use of the customer email communication; generates actionable threat intelligence feeds for your security and transaction monitoring systems helping to block targeted attacks proactively and also helps in identification of lookalike domains for your brand.
To summarize, ProDMARC helps improve customer trust in email communications.
Get in touch with us or schedule your 15-day trial for the most advanced email security solutions.
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DKIM stands for Domain Keys Identified Mail which is an email authentication technique that helps the receiver to check whether the email was sent and authorized by the owner of that domain. It is done by giving the email a digital signature. It is a header added to the
message and is secured with encryption. The DKIM signatures are not visible to end-users and the validation is done on the server level.
What is a DKIM selector?
The DKIM selector is a string used by the outgoing server to detect the private key to sign the email message and by the receiving server to detect the public key to verify whether the email message is from a trusted source or not.
Every time a private or public key pair is generated, a tuple { selector, private key, public key } is created, where the selector is used to detect the private key and the public key.
How does the DKIM selector work?
When the signing server chooses the selector, the server makes use of the selector to find the private key only accessible to the server, to decode the signature. Once the signature is decoded, the DKIM selector is inserted in the email headers as an s= tag, then the email is sent.
Let us understand by the following example:
Let’s consider that the selector chosen by the signing server is s1, the tag will look like s=s1. Further, the selector can be any arbitrarily chosen string like itismyselector1122, as long as it is indicating towards a valid private or public key pair.
Here is a practical example of DKIM signature header
Here the DKIM selector used in the DKIM signature is s=s1.
When the email reaches the receiving server, the server automatically looks at the email headers to locate the s= tag. Now if the tag is present then the server will perform the role of extracting the selector from the tag.
When the public key is found, the server makes use of it to decrypt the message to verify the integrity. If the integrity is verified, the DKIM authentication succeeds otherwise it fails.
In case no public key is found then the DKIM authentication fails.
How do I find my DKIM selector?
A DKIM selector is specified when the private or public key pair gets created when it is set up for the email sender, and it can be any random or arbitrary string of text.
The selector is inserted into the DKIM-Signature email header as an s= tag when the email is sent. The easiest way to discover the selector for your domain is by sending an email to yourself.
When you open the email, view the “original message” of the email. Your focus here is to view the header information, which includes all the DKIM authentication results.
Search the headers for “DKIM-signature” to find if the DKIM signature is applied to the message or not. If there are multiple DKIM-Signature headers, find the one which contains your domain. This DKIM signature contains an attribute “s=” which is the selector used.
Relationship between DKIM and DMARC
DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.” It is an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol that is built around both SPF and DKIM.
Now you might be wondering when DMARC uses both DKIM and SPF then why it is necessary. It ensures that when an email is received, the information received in both records matches the “friendly form” domain that the user actually sees and the form address that is contained in the message’s header. A DMARC record is created when you have both SPK and DKIM in place. Sometimes many domains don’t have SPF or DKIM set up, so the best way to go about it is through DMARC implementation tools. DMARC setup is similar to that of SPF as it is a simple one-line entry in the domain’s DNS records. It ties the DKIM and SPF protocols with a consistent set of policies.
Now, why do we need to use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC together?
The combination of these security protocols helps to combat the issue of Spam and Spear Phishing. Many networks are compromised because of these issues so the IT managers are looking for a better solution. Along with the increased rise in ransomware which often is preceded by spear-phishing emails, the enterprises are getting motivated towards protecting their email infrastructure.
Each of the elements- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC solves a somewhat different piece of the email puzzle to prevent phishing emails and spam. This is accomplished through a combination of standard authentication and encryption tools such as public and private key signing, and adding special DNS records to authenticate email coming from your domains.
Also, there has been significant evolution in the internet’s email protocols. Now emails are used by everyone to facilitate everyday communication. So when the email infrastructure implements all these protocols, it can be ensured that messages cannot be easily forged and you can block them from ever-darkening your users’ inboxes.
Conclusion
DKIM is an email authentication technology that has been around since 2005. It is a method of adding a tamper-proof seal to the emails and ensuring that the emails are protected and safe. DMARC combines the elements of DKIM and SPF and ensures a secured way to deal with spam and spear phishing.
ProDMARC is a user-friendly DMARC email protection solution that acts as your expert guide to help you move as quickly as possible to a reject policy. ProDMARC is a SaaS solution that enables organizations to handle complex DMARC deployments with ease. Across all email networks, the solution offers 360-degree visibility and governance.
Contact us for the best email authentication solutions.
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A DNS txt record published in your public DNS is known as a DMARC record. This is a DMARC record, as indicated by the DMARC version tag. The receiver would be able to recognize this as your DMARC record if they query your public DNS.
The policy tag is the DMARC policy you set for DMARC emails that fail SPF and DKIM authentication; in other words, it’s the action you recommend to your email recipients when they receive emails that you haven’t approved as legitimate. Depending on the results of your DMARC report study, you can choose from three different policies.
The email address to which you want DMARC aggregate reports sent is the DMARC aggregate tag. These reports are usually sent to a DMARC analyzer for further review. They provide information about the origins of your emails as well as the results of your SPF and DKIM authentication on the email receivers’ end. This data is used to classify and authenticate all valid email sending sources.
ProDMARC assists you in quickly generating DMARC records. You can generate a sample DMARC record with ProDMARC. You configure DMARC by applying policies to your domain’s DNS records in the form of TXT records once SPF and DKIM are in place (just like with SPF or DKIM).
In this scenario, the sender defines the policy as such that the receiver outright rejects all non-aligned messages and sends a report about the rejections to a specific email address. If the sender were to use the “quarantine” setting in the policy, it would look like:
and would request the action to quarantine on the receiving end of the message. In the next example, if a message claims to be from your domain.com and fails DMARC, no action is taken. Instead, these messages will then show up in your daily aggregate report sent to
Only the v (version) and p (policy) tags are required. Three possible policy settings are available:
none – Take no action. Only log the affected messages in the daily report.
quarantine – Mark affected messages as spam.
reject – Cancel the message at the SMTP layer.
The study in which sender records are compared to SPF and DKIM signatures is known as DMARC alignment mode. There are two options for values: a relaxed “r” or a rigid “s.” Partial matches, such as subdomains, are allowed with some relaxation, whereas strict matches demand an exact match.
If you use the optional rua tag, make sure to include an email address where the regular updates will be sent.
3. Deploy your DMARC policy slowly
Since the DMARC specification recognizes that scaling out the deployment all at once can be difficult for certain organizations, there are some built-in methods for “throttling” the DMARC processing so that complete deployment can be achieved in stages over time.
The first step is to keep an eye on your traffic and reports. Assess the vulnerabilities (where messages are sent without being digitally signed or from invalid source IP addresses) and use SPF and DKIM records to address them.
As you become more comfortable with the findings from your regular aggregate reports, you will adjust the action on your policies to start quarantining. You can do this by using DMARC to change your TXT record to use the “quarantine” action. Keep an eye on your daily reports.
After you’ve been tracking your traffic and regular reports for a while and are certain that the sources seen sending traffic on behalf of your domain are all digitally signed, you can proceed to the next phase, which is modifying the policy to use the “reject” tag to completely deploy DMARC. Monitoring your reports and your spam feed is an essential part of maintenance for DMARC compliance.
It’s also worth noting that the pct tag, which is optional, can be used to sample your DMARC implementation in increments. Since 100% is the norm, setting “pct=20” in your DMARC TXT record causes one-fifth of all messages affected by the policy to receive the disposition rather than all of them. When you want to quarantine and reject mail, this setting is particularly useful. Start with a lower percent to begin with, and increase it every few days.
When you are ready to complete the DMARC setup, remove the percentages from your policies so that the full action of “quarantine” and “reject” is now functioning at 100%. As always, monitor your daily reports.
4. Use a user-friendly DMARC analyzing software
ProDMARC is a user-friendly DMARC email protection solution that acts as your expert guide to help you move as quickly as possible to a reject policy. ProDMARC is a SaaS solution that enables organizations to handle complex DMARC deployments with ease. Across all email networks, the solution offers 360-degree visibility and governance. Contact us for the best email authentication solutions.
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Many businesses make the mistake of relying on their consumers or staff to detect and report phishing attacks.
This technique, however, is flawed. Around the world, 90% of leading brand domains are targeted by malicious emails.
The first line of defense against email fraud should be technology that prevents malicious messages before they enter the inbox. That’s exactly what the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) standard does.
Many people are confused about what DMARC is and how it prevents domain misuse, impersonation, and fraud. This can lead to major misconceptions about DMARC, how it functions, and why it’s beneficial to you. In that case, how can you be certain your DMARC implementation strategy is correct?
ProDMARC comes to your rescue! To help you understand DMARC better, we’ve compiled this list of the top 6 most common misconceptions people have about DMARC.
What are Common Misconceptions About DMARC?
1. DMARC is the same as a spam filter
This is one of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to DMARC. Incoming email that is sent to your inbox is blocked by spam filters. Suspicious emails can come from anyone’s domain, not just yours. Receiving email servers, on the other hand, are told how to manage outgoing emails sent from your domain by DMARC. Spam filters, such as Microsoft Office 365 ATP, aren’t enough to shield you from such cyberattacks. If your domain is DMARC-enforced and the email fails authentication, the receiving server rejects it.
2. Once you set up DMARC, your email is safe forever
While DMARC is one of the most advanced email authentication protocols available, it isn’t fully self-contained. You should check your DMARC files on a regular basis to ensure that emails from trusted sources are not being rejected. More specifically, you can keep an eye out for unauthorized senders who are exploiting your domain.
When you see an IP address attempting to spoof your email on a regular basis, you must act quickly to get them blacklisted or taken down.
3. DMARC will reduce my email deliverability
When configuring DMARC, make sure your policy is set to p=none. All of your emails will still be sent, but you will receive DMARC reports indicating whether or not they passed authentication. If you notice that your own emails are failing DMARC during this monitoring time, you may take steps to resolve the issue. Once all your authorized emails are getting validated correctly, you can enforce DMARC with a policy of p=quarantine or p=reject.
4. I don’t need to enforce DMARC (p=none is enough)
When you set up DMARC without implementing it (policy of p=none), all emails sent from your domain are delivered, even if they fail DMARC. You’ll receive DMARC reports, but your domain won’t be protected from spoofing attempts. It’s critical to set your policy to p=quarantine or p=reject and implement DMARC after the initial monitoring period.
5. Only big brands need DMARC
Many smaller businesses claim that DMARC security is only needed for the world’s most well-known brands. In fact, cybercriminals can launch a spoofing attack on any business domain. Since many smaller companies lack dedicated cybersecurity teams, attackers find it much easier to target small and medium-sized businesses. Remember, every organization that has a domain name needs DMARC protection!
6. DMARC Reports are easy to read
Many companies are adopting DMARC and receiving reports in their own email inboxes. The issue is that DMARC files are written in an XML file format, which can be difficult to understand if you aren’t familiar with them. ProDMARC can translate your complicated XML files into easy-to-read reports, but using a dedicated DMARC framework can not only make your setup process much simpler. Using a dedicated DMARC platform can not only make your setup process much easier, but ProDMARC can convert your complex XML files into easy-to-read reports with graphs, charts, and in-depth stats.
Conclusion
ProDMARC is a simple and secure DMARC email protection solution that is designed to address the evolving business needs of companies. By blocking phishing attempts, notifying you about them as soon as possible, and getting those false positives to zero, we provide 100 percent DMARC protection. As a result, the company’s productivity and deliverability will improve. Get Started with top-class cybersecurity solutions for your business at ProGIST.
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DMARC is the acronym for Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.
It is a security practice in the world of email that allows people to determine which messages are from legitimate sources such as businesses, and which are from fraudsters seeking to take advantage of them.
DMARC is used by organizations in a number of industries for a variety of purposes that we will address later, but the overarching aim is to defend against spam and reduce cybercrime.
The definition of DMARC is not entirely new. Instead, it employs DKIM and/or SPF to conduct a more detailed review of each email received.
A domain owner may define its own authentication protocol with DMARC using a DMARC policy
The DMARC policy is used to signal to an incoming server what to do if a message fails the DMARC test. Finally, the policy will produce reports that detail each review to help enhance processes and provide early warning if the account is spam.
Let us take a look at how the other two methods for authenticating emails operate to get a better understanding of this process.
How does DMARC work?
The best way to understand DMARC is that it is a method of evaluating whether or not an email is authentic. Companies may use this standard to publish policies or regulations within their email system, causing messages that do not follow particular criteria to be discarded.
Anyone studying DMARC should be familiar with the acronyms SPF and DKIM, which stand for Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys Defined Mail, respectively. Before DMARC can be implemented, each of these protocols must be defined.
SPF
The Sender Policy Framework is a process that allows you to accept messages sent on your behalf. Each email contains a communication between the recipient’s DNS server and the sender’s DNS server.
By introducing an SPF, your DNS will only be able to send messages from IP addresses that have been authorized (essentially, devices).
Emails from other IP addresses are blocked, so no one in another country can send messages on your behalf.
There are many tools available to help you set up an SPF. Although each domain provider will typically have its own set of rules to follow, ProDMARC’s version of the DMARC setup process is relatively simple.
DKIM
DKIM, on the other hand, is relatively straightforward to describe but substantially more difficult to implement than SPF.
Each email will be marked with an invisible stamp that works similarly to a signature on a letter. This information is stored in the header and decrypted by the recipient’s server, which enables it to authorize the sender based on what it knows about them.
Many tech experts also note the use of DKIM to ensure that an email has not been tampered with on the way to the recipient’s inbox, similar to how people line out blank spaces on checks to prevent further information from being added.
DKIM is a little difficult to set up. It requires the development of a public key (the system that enables a mail server to decrypt your signature) as well as a private key (which encrypts it, therefore hiding it from others).
Your domain provider should have instructions that will allow you to set up both.
Why should your organization use DMARC?
By now, you should have a clear idea of why it is important to have DMARC records associated with your messages. To drive home the point, we will go over each gain one by one, beginning with security.
DMARC’s reporting function means that receivers activated by DMARC can tell you:
Email Spoofing
There are several types of fraud, and email is arguably one of the worst-affected fields.
According to the Herjavec Group, cybercrime would cost the world $6 trillion by 2021; although it is difficult to predict how much of that would come from spoofing techniques, a simple glance through your junk mail can reveal how many people are trying to cheat you for financial benefit.
Of course, it is less about data breaches and network infiltrations that drill holes in the networks and steal money in this case. DMARC is used to check the company’s own identity, stopping actual consumers from communicating with people posing as you.
Damage To Your Brand’s Reputation
If one of your customers gives money or information to an imposter, the outcome will almost always be a negative experience.
DMARC is an extra security mechanism intended to keep out criminals who are becoming more innovative in their tactics.
That said, you should possibly say goodbye to any large orders from customers who were caught in the crossfire. They will be unsure of which senders they can trust, and even the mention of your brand can conjure up unpleasant memories.
Awareness
Many small businesses are unaware of how vulnerable they are to cybercriminals.
It is the same if you are a regular person with a small savings account. You should not want someone to steal your prize money because the criminals have bigger fish to fry.
Email authentication
If you send email messages that you think could be spoofed, you can inform recipients that if the SPF/DKIM checks fail, they can reject or quarantine the post. Rejection or DMARC quarantine is useful if you want your recipients to be 100% positive that an email from one of your receiving domains really came from you. This will ensure that your domains and brand are still trusted.
Feedback and reporting
There are two types of DMARC reports. Aggregate reports show you the email message header data as well as the recorded information, such as the message disposition, which indicates what the recipient did with the messages.The harassment reports that go through the email server Feedback Loops are close to forensic reports. They are modified versions of email messages that failed SPF, DKIM, or both. These are useful for finding any snags that may occur during the DMARC implementation.
Final Thoughts- Why is DMARC important?
We hope we have clarified the benefits of adopting a DMARC policy clearly, but cybersecurity professionals are taking their time to spread the word.
Although 47 percent of government domains have adopted this feature ahead of time, research reveals that just 0.5 percent of the world’s top one million domains have done so, despite the fact that 76 percent of email clients support it.
Worse still, according to research 77 percent of domains with a DMARC policy may not be sufficiently covered due to DMARC configuration issues.
It is important to set things up with the aid of an expert if you want to defend your organization from cybercrime.
ProDMARC is a convenient and secure DMARC email protection that has been specifically developed to meet the changing business needs of organizations. We provide 100 percent DMARC security by blocking phishing attempts, notifying you as soon as possible, and reducing false positives to 0%. As a consequence, the organization’s efficiency and deliverability will increase. Get Started with top-class cybersecurity solutions for your business at ProgIST.
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The ability to create fake emails has long been used by cybercriminals as a tool for the deployment of spam, phishing attacks, or malware, and has been so since email was invented. DMARC is an easy way to give an email recipient the opportunity to verify an email’s validity with additional security that makes it easier to recognize.
It is understood that cybercriminals copy well-known brands and use the trusted reputation of the brand to send emails to recipients and orchestrate an impostor. The offenders end up giving away confidential data such as credit card pins, passwords or even end up making payments to the impostors.
What is DMARC?
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email protection service that enables the identification and prevention of email spoofing. The aim of DMARC is to wage war on email phishing scams, where the address of the sender has been forged to look as if it came from a legitimate organization.
How does DMARC protect your domain emails?
For an organization that sends emails to its customers, DMARC guarantees that valid emails are authenticated and the identity of the sender is checked by the email service provider of the recipients. Fraudulent emails that tend to be originating from domains under the jurisdiction of the company are blocked. In its DMARC policy, the organization can also include domains that do not send emails or even defensively registered domains.
Inbound emails that fail DMARC authentication do not enter the inbox of the recipient, so phishing emails are filtered out. So, if you get an Income Tax Department email with a “From” address with intimations@cpc.gov.in, did cpc.gov.in really approve the message?
DMARC is built on two existing and widely deployed email authentication techniques, the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
SPF- enables domain owners to approve hosts who can use the “MAIL FROM” or “HELLO” identifier with their domain name. A list of hosts that are permitted to use a specific domain name is published as a specially formatted TXT record in the Domain Name System (DNS) records of that domain.
DKIM– allows a digital signature for a domain owner tag and email message. Email authentication is performed using the public key of the signer, which is published in the DNS. A valid signature ensures that, since the signature was attached, at least some parts of the email have not been changed.
While SPF and DKIM helped identify fake emails, neither of these protocols included a way to report what and why messages were denied. DMARC addresses this issue by enabling domain owners to tag sent messages to prove validity with certain domain identifiers.
It provides instructions for receiving email servers on how to deal with messages that fail authentication tests for SPF and DKIM; and also provides a reporting system to convey what activities were taken under the policies.
Benefits of DMARC
What separates DMARC from other protocols for email authentication is its reporting feature. You can see who sends emails on behalf of your domain, your brand, with DMARC, and stop spammers from using it to send fake emails.
DMARC’s reporting function means that receivers activated by DMARC can tell you:
How many messages they’ve received using your domains in the From address
Where the messages come from
If they passed DKIM and SPF tests on these messages
Other advantages:
Before DMARC, receiving email servers did their best to decide whether or not the email was legitimate. It was never perfect and users had to search for lost emails in spam folders.
DMARC offers visibility dealing with messages that fail to authenticate.
By preventing unauthorized hosts from sending mail on your domain’s behalf, publishing a DMARC record protects your brand.
Valid emails are easily recognized after setting up your DMARC Record. This means you can advise all recipients to reject emails from anyone who imitates your business. This was DMARC’s original goal-to stop domain harassment.
DMARC reports give you an insight into who is sending mail from your domain.
It is easier to decide that the messages are not bad for inbox providers. Such emails are more likely to be sent easily and without errors to the recipient’s mail. Setting up a DMARC policy and finding the best service provider to deliver your emails would only help improve the credibility of your company.
Conclusion
We at ProGIST suggest getting a well-implemented DMARC setup to avoid emails reaching end-users who spoof your domain. This is a highly successful way to avoid the sending of both general phishing emails to your customers and spear phishing emails to your employees.
ProDMARC hand holds you during the entire life cycle of implementing DMARC including domains that do not send emails or even defensively registered domains. We study your outbound email traffic trend including marketing communications sent by third-party email campaign tools, by configuring SPF and DKIM records in your DNS for all your domains and configuring the DMARC record in your DNS with the right policies from the “monitoring” to “blocking” modes. Contact our experts for advanced cyber security solutions for your business.
