29th September 2021, Kathmandu
DMARC is an ecumenical standard for email authentication. It sanctions senders to verify that the electronic mail genuinely emanates from whom it claims to emanate. This avails curb spam and phishing attacks, which are among the most prevalent cybercrimes of today. Gmail, Yahoo, and many other astronomically immense email providers have implemented DMARC and exalted its benefits in recent years.
If your company’s domain denomination is bankofamerica.com, you do not operate a cyber assailer to be able to send emails under that domain. This puts your brand reputation in jeopardy and could potentially spread financial malware. The DMARC standard averts this by checking whether emails are sent from an expected IP address or domain. It designates how domains can be contacted if there are authentication or migration issues and provides forensic information so senders can monitor email traffic and quarantine suspicious emails.
What is a Phishing Attack?
Phishing is an endeavor by cybercriminals to chicane victims into giving away sensitive information such as credit card numbers and passwords via fake websites and fictitiously unauthentic emails. Phishing is a form of convivial engineering. It is adscititiously one of the most mundane methods cybercriminals use to infiltrate businesses and compromise their sensitive data.
Domain spoofing is a precursor to most phishing attacks used to spoof emails. In this process, an assailer spoofs a legitimate electronic mail address or domain name and sends fake emails containing phishing links and ransomware to the company’s clientele. The unsuspecting recipient believes the spoofed email emanates from a company they ken and trust and ends up sharing their corporate or banking information with the assailant, thereby getting phished. This affects the reputation of businesses and leads to the loss of prospects and customers.
DMARC can avail minimize direct-domain spoofing endeavors, which indirectly withal cuts down on phishing attacks perpetrated via spoofed company domains.
How to Identify a Phishing Email Sent from a Spoofed Domain?
Spoofing is not an incipient threat. Email spoofing is an illusory tactic utilized by assailers to manipulate both the identity of the sender of an electronic mail message and the ostensible inchoation of that message. Most spoofing attacks either use forged header information or engender a fictitiously unauthentic sender’s electronic mail address.
Recipients can detect phishing emails sent from a spoofed company domain by examining the electronic mail header information, such as the “from:” address and “return-path” address, and verifying that they match. While the electronic mail “From” address is a visible header, the “return-path” address is conventionally not immediately visible, and upon inspecting, it can avail receivers detect the pristine identity of the assailer.
For example, A phishing email sent from a spoofed domain will most likely have it’s From: address as: marketing@company.com, which looks authentic to the untrained ocular perceiver of the receiver who is acclimated with the accommodations of the verbalized company. However, on inspecting the Return-path address, the receiver will realize that the electronic mail does not emanate from where the sender claims it to be,
Domain owners can adscititiously detect and identify domain spoofing and impersonation endeavors by deploying a DMARC report analyzer at their organization. PowerDMARC’s DMARC report analyzer sanctions domain owners to:
- Receive and read their DMARC reports on a well-organized dashboard, across a single pane of glass, in lieu of having to read individual reports sent to them on their electronic mail or web server.
- Organizations’ DMARC data is organized and assorted into convenient viewing formats such as per result, per sending source, per country, per organization, detailed stats, and geolocation.
- Difficult-to-read XML files containing DMARC aggregate data are parsed into simpler and facilely readable documents.
- Domain owners can export the data in the form of scheduled PDF reports to apportion with employees for cognizance and inspection.
- Forensic information on malevolent sending sources providing granular details on the inchoation and location of these forged addresses so they can be facilely reported and taken down.
How to Minimize Email Phishing with DMARC?
A DMARC policy mode of the project can be an efficacious solution in combating a wide range of cyberattacks, including direct-domain spoofing and email phishing.
DMARC avails verify the inchoation of emails and block out fake emails from being received and opened. However, in authenticity, a circumscribed number of businesses have genuinely adopted the protocol, and an even more minuscule population has implemented it congruously.
PowerDMARC’s DMARC analyzer avails organizations in achieving DMARC enforcement the right way! While a DMARC reject policy, when taken lightly, can lead to the loss of legitimate emails, hosted DMARC accommodations ascertain amelioration in email deliverability and minimized email phishing attacks over a period of time.
PowerDMARC’s DMARC analyzer avails organizations to safely upgrade their DMARC policy from monitoring only to project, so they can relish the benefits of email authentication without worrying about the consequences.
Adscititiously, when you are on the project, you can avail of the benefits of visual identification with BIMI, by annexing your unique brand logo to categorical outgoing electronic mails that reach your clients.