Tag: WHAT IS DMARC

DMARC by Tangent

DMARC: The Ultimate Guide to Email Authentication

Michelle

Email authentication is a critical aspect of email security. It helps ensure that the emails you send and receive are legitimate and not forged or spoofed. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is one of the most effective email authentication protocols that organizations can implement to prevent email fraud and protect their brand reputation. In this blog post, we will explore what DMARC is, how it works, and how you can implement it to secure your email communications.

What is DMARC?

DMARC is an email authentication protocol that uses two other protocols, SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), to authenticate email messages. DMARC builds on top of SPF and DKIM and adds an additional layer of security by providing a mechanism for email receivers to determine if a given message is legitimate or not.

How does DMARC work?

DMARC works by allowing domain owners to publish policies in their DNS records that specify which authentication mechanisms (SPF and/or DKIM) are employed by the domain and what action should be taken if a message fails authentication checks. When an email is received, the receiver checks the message’s authentication status against the domain’s DMARC policy. If the message passes authentication checks, it is delivered to the recipient’s inbox. If the message fails authentication checks, the receiver can take actions such as quarantining or rejecting the message.

Why is DMARC important?

DMARC is important because it helps prevent email fraud and protects your brand reputation. By implementing DMARC, you can ensure that your customers receive only legitimate emails from your domain and not phishing or spam emails. Additionally, DMARC provides visibility into who is sending emails on your behalf, which can help you identify unauthorized senders and take appropriate actions to stop them.

How to implement DMARC?

To implement DMARC, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Create a DMARC record in your DNS zone file.
  2. Set your DMARC policy to “none” to monitor email traffic without taking any actions.
  3. Analyze your DMARC reports to understand the email traffic and identify any authentication failures.
  4. Gradually increase your DMARC policy to “quarantine” or “reject” to prevent unauthorized senders from using your domain.

DMARC is an essential email authentication protocol that can help organizations prevent email fraud and protect their brand reputation. By implementing DMARC, you can ensure that only legitimate emails are sent from your domain, and unauthorized senders are stopped from using your domain for spam or phishing. Follow the steps outlined in this post to implement DMARC and secure your email communications.

Solutions such as DMARC Director can guide you through the steps of setting up and managing DMARC swiftly and easily. Visit: DMARC.Tangent.com to Demo

How DMARC Protects Businesses

Michelle

Did you know that one email in every 99 is a phishing attack? Or that around 25 percent of these emails usually make their way into inboxes? 

And the worst thing is that more than 97 percent of people can’t identify what a spam email looks like. So, many of them fall for socially engineered attacks like phishing, scareware, quid pro quo, and baiting. 

Even companies like Google, Facebook, and Target aren’t infallible. That raises the question: how can you protect your business from email phishing and other socially engineered attacks? 

This is where DMARC comes in. But what is DMARC, and how does it protect your business from phishing, email hijacking, or scareware? Let’s break it down. 

What Is DMARC?

Domain-based Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is a technical protocol that handles emails that aren’t authenticated by DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). 

It helps protect email senders and recipients from email phishing, spoofing, and impersonation fraud, which can be the source of data breaches and email compromises. DMARC allows domain owners to specify actions that need to be taken when an email fails DKIM and SPF authentication. 

Email receivers can check whether incoming messages have valid DKIM and SPF records and whether they align with the domain of origin. If these messages don’t comply with DKIM and SPF records, they are labeled DMARC-failed. 

How Does DMARC Handle Failed Email? 

You have the option to handle a DMARC-failed message based on three different DMARC policies, including: 

  • The Monitor Policy: p=none – It will provide insights into who sent a DMARC-failed email, but it won’t stop the email from reaching your primary inbox. 
  • The Quarantine Policy: p=quarantine – It will send DMARC-failed emails into the spam folder and DMARC-passed emails into your primary inbox, reducing the harm caused by spam emails.  
  • The Reject Policy: p=reject – It will stop DMARC-failed emails from reaching your inbox entirely, preventing phishing or spoofing attacks.  

4 Ways DMARC Protects Businesses

DMARC aims to protect businesses and users from socially engineered attacks. Here’s how it accomplishes that goal:

  1. It Increases Domain Visibility

DMARC’s monitoring “p=none” policy reports all email activity, so you can assess all the emails sent from your domain, those you received, which emails were authenticated, those that weren’t authenticated, and for what reasons. 

  1. It Only Allows Certain Domains to Send Emails

If attackers use a trusted domain, they can penetrate your company’s defenses and deceive your employees or customers, often causing irreparable damage to your brand image and decreasing brand trust. 

DMARC can prevent that by only allowing authorized IPS to send emails from your domain. 

  1. It Blocks Fraudulent Emails 

DMARC’s reject policy allows you to control whether or not suspicious emails are delivered to your email. So, if a specific email doesn’t pass DKIM and SPF records, you can reject it before it causes problems. 

It also blocks business email compromise (BEC) scams, which occur when criminals impersonate business employees within a company. 

  1. It Increases Legitimate Email Delivery 

As DMARC checks the domains and IPs of every incoming and outgoing email, it ensures that only legitimate emails get delivered to your primary inbox. This prevents phishing, spoofing, and compromise scams. 

The Bottom Line

Hackers are always looking for ways to get into your systems and domains. But DMARC can derail their efforts, saving your business time and money. 

It prevents your company’s email from being used for phishing, scareware, and other social engineering attacks, makes phishing attacks visible, mitigates the impact of malware and phishing attacks, and protects you from BEC scams.

So, ensure your company’s safety and maintain your customers’ trust by getting a DMARC protocol coded into your domain today. 

DMARC

DMARC: A Simple Solution to Avoid Spam

Admin

Are you wondering how DMARC is a simple solution to avoid spam? Here is a thorough explanation of what DMARC is, how it helps to prevent spam, and why your business requires it for security.

What is DMARC?

DMARC stands for Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance Solutions, which is used to make email communication safer. DMARC is designed to safeguard the email domain from hackers who use it for many purposes, including email spoofing or phishing scams. 

It continuously monitors the domain’s outgoing email, and the receiving server uses the DMARC data to confirm whether the email is originating from a reliable source or not. DMARC is an email policy layer that ensures that emails fulfill two standards: 

  • DomainKeys identified mail (DKIM)
  • Sender-Policy Framework (SPF)

These two standards ensure that Emails are not including phishing scams and that emails sent from your domain are DMARC-compliant. So, they are not flagged as risky email messages. 

Benefits of Using DMARC

There are several top-notch advantages of using DMARC on your email server. Many brands or even Government organizations are using DMARC for security which even allows: 

  • Gain visibility into the email channel to identify the legit and malicious usage of the domain
  • Make sure legit email is delivering while malicious email is not
  • Get notifications when modifications to the email infrastructure could affect the delivery of legal messages
  • Identify threat sources so that they are prepared to prevent attacks before they happen
  • Boost email reputation score and trust

Why Use DMARC for Email?

Email is included in a number of all network attacks, and without using DMARC, it is quite difficult to identify whether the email is fake or real. DMARC helps the domain owner secure and safeguard their domain from malicious use by fighting CEO fraud, spoofing, or phishing. 

Furthermore, there are more than 5 billion email accounts worldwide, and the email channel is the only one with a larger audience. It ensures that the hackers use this channel for illegal purposes. 

In this situation, compliance (DMARC) adds value. DMARC not only offers comprehensive visibility into email channels and also highlights the phishing scams. DMARC is powerful enough to prevent malware attacks and scams and protect against brand abuse. 

Conclusion

DMARC instructs the receiving servers to verify the authenticity of emails originating from an organization’s domain. Using DMARC, the company can fully understand its email channel and phishing attacks coming from its domain, which was previously only possible after the attacks. However, it plays a great role in securing a domain from malicious threats, which are possible via emails.