How DMARC Can Stop Criminals Sending Fake Emails on Behalf of Your Domain

21st-century technology has allowed Cybercriminals to use sophisticated and undetectable methods for malicious activities.

In 2020 alone, a survey revealed that 65% of US-based companies were vulnerable to email phishing and impersonation attacks. This calls for upgrading your organization’s security with DMARC, which if not implemented, will enable cyber-attackers to:

• Instigate money transfers from vulnerable employees via spoofed emails while impersonating senior executives in your company
• Send fake invoices to your employees and partners
• Deal in illegal goods via your domain
• Spread Ransomware
• Impersonate customer support to steal confidential customer or partner information

Such situations can have long-lasting consequences on your business. From inflicting a blow on thebrand’s reputation and credibility among its partners and customer base to loss of valuable company information and millions of dollars, the risks are countless.

What is Domain Spoofing?

Domain spoofing is a very common form of a security breach wherein a cybercriminal tries to impersonate a company’s business email domain to carry out a range of malicious activities by forging the sender’s address.

The attackers create credible From fields in the emails that they send out so as to increase the chances of them looking legitimate and thereby being opened by receivers. The goal of domain spoofing is to trick users into believing that the email is coming from an authenticated source and manipulating them into interacting with the fraudulent email embedded with malicious links as if it were legitimate.

Wondering how attackers manage that? This is facilitated by a lack of email authentication protocol in the organization. Email domains generally operate via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), which is a communication protocol that enables the transfer of mail via digital platforms. However, it has its own limitations, such as the lack of an automated email authentication mechanism programmed in it. Cybercriminals take advantage of this vulnerability to spoof email domains and send out fraudulent emails, posing to be you.

Email spoofing can have severe consequences and can lead to the loss of confidential company information or instigate money transfers from partners or employees while posing to be senior executives of the company. We can better understand the threat landscape by taking a few real-life examples:

• In October of 2020, the US Census Bureau deployed a warning against hackers who were attempting to spoof their domains, using them to launch phishing scams and credential thefts. They provided insight into a whopping 63 newly registered domains impersonating the US Census Bureau.
• A New York-based trading firm in mid-August stated to have lost $6.9 million in a BEC scam in May 2020, and more than 80% of companies in the US have claimed to have been hit with Business Email Compromise post-pandemic.
• The incurrence of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the month of November 2020 has further heightened the chances of domain spoofing of popular retail stores in the guise of attractive offers and gift cards sent to their customer base by attackers.

How Can DMARC Protect Your Business?

DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance, is anemail authentication protocol created with the objective of securing business domains and brands from spoofing attacks. DMARC enforces the use of a combination ofSPF andDKIM email authentication technologies to ensure only real emails are delivered to the end receivers.

Without DMARC, all emails sent from the email domain of your business reaches the receiver’s inbox without any security check or validation. However, with DMARC, the receiver’s Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) looks up the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records of the domain name to authenticate the sender. Once the sender is verified or authenticated, the mail lands in the receiver’s inbox.

By authenticating all emails sent from your domain, you not only prevent imposters from misusing your domain name to carry out malicious activities and launder money but also improves the email deliverability and make your customers and partners respond to your emails more promptly.

Implementing email authentication protocols at your organization helps you stay updated on the changing tactics of attackers, protect your company databases, and prevent financial or information losses.

In order to stay updated on the ever-changing tactics of cybercriminals, opting for DMARC monitoring and timely reporting mechanisms is as imperative as simply opting for DMARC enforcement to ensure visibility and improve email deliverability. This is why you should confide in a tool likePowerDMARC.

PowerDMARC not only incorporates mechanisms for email authentication with DMARC but provides a scalable range of additional features that far exceed the usual facilities:

Automated Email Authentication

• PowerDMARC’s multi-faceted DMARC analyzer tool eases up the process of shifting to DMARC enforcement from p=none to p= reject/quarantine in no time! It nullifies the fear of breaking the email system by making the enforcement process speedy and easy, providing complete visibility and analysis to help system administrators optimize their SPF/DKIM sending sources to comply with DMARC policy.
• PowerBIMI provides a hosted BIMI Record service by assigning your company logo next to the email so that receivers can easily demarcate between fake and real emails. 3 easy steps, upload your logo, generate the automated BIMI DNS records and publish them at your domain DNS.Increased Visibility
• Implementing PowerDMARC helps you receive daily reports on the mails that are passing and failing the security checks and DMARC verification, with DNS alerts in case of miss configurations in SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and BIMI, along with real-time forensic alerts.
• The 24/7 monitoring facilities by security experts keep an eye on all thesending sources and detect unauthorized senders trying to impersonate you, with a real-time alert system for reporting spoofing attacks and viewing the abuser’s history of domain abuse.
• The real-time DMARC monitoring tool offers complete visibility to your email domain, monitoring email spoofing attacks taking place worldwide via threat mapping.

Forensic Encryption

PowerDMARC empowers you to get detailed visibility on your DMARC RUF Failure reports (Forensics) along with its Threat Intelligence and AI engine. It also allows you toencrypt the feedback headers and mail headers of your DMARC Forensic RUF reports using your own PGP keys to ensure absolute privacy.

PowerSPF

Every time your SPF record uses mechanisms to specify receiving servers how to handle an email, it results in a DNS lookup. For preventing DoS attacks, the number of DNS lookups per SPF record is limited to a maximum of 10. Therefore for organizations relying on multiple third-party vendors, crossing the 10 DNS lookup limit is unavoidable.

As soon as this happens, even authorized inbound emails will fail SPF check! PowerSPF enables you to add or remove senders in your SPF record with ease so that you always stay under the 10 DNS lookup limit. It resolves the “permerror” issue, SPF record errors, limits, and configuration problems on a single platform.

MSSP Program

PowerDMARC is a multi-tenant MSSP DMARC SaaS platform that offers MSP/MSSP/partners the capability to resell the service with full control to manage and provision their own customers.

By partnering up with PowerDMARC, you can gain access to a multi-tenant dashboard along with special pricing, premium support options, and independent optimization facilities.

To learn more about how experts can help you protect your organization from BEC and spoofing attacks with the help of PowerDMARC, book a demo or sign up for a free DMARC trial today!