What Is DMARC Email Security and How Do You Implement It?
If you’re like most small business owners and executives, email is valuable on every level; it’s a vital tool for communication, customer service and marketing. However, as cyber attackers have become more adept at phishing scams and other means of accessing corporate email accounts, the need to implement forward-looking security measures has never been clearer. Using email security measures to combat cyberattacks is more important than ever, and DMARC should be implemented as part of any organization’s business email security protocol. Here’s an overview of how DMARC works and what it does. Email servers are regularly targeted by cyber-criminals, especially because they are relatively vulnerable to various attacks compared to other systems. With DMARC email security, you can protect your customers against business email compromise (BEC), an increasingly popular form of hacking that relies on spoofing to fool the people that you're sending emails to. DMARC also helps to ensure that mailing lists are valid and authentic. While implementing DMARC is a complex process, it's a good idea for MSPs to know about it, which is why we've written about it in this article. What Is DMARC? DMARC is an email validation system designed to protect business email domains from being exploited via email spoofing, phishing scams, and other cybercrimes. DMARC leverages two existing email authentication techniques—Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Put in place as a receiving mail server policy for your domain, it allows you to specify which specific senders are authorized to use your domain when sending you messages. DMARC helps the owner of a domain check who’s sending email on behalf of their domain. The DNS record (the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records) you set up can be used to automatically accept emails when they're sent from someone you trust, or block emails that were received from someone you don't trust. You are not the only one to have noticed that your domain has a tendency to get targeted by phishers. But before you give up on managing your email reputation, check out this guide and find out how DMARC can be used to safeguard your domains against email spoofing and phishing attacks. Why Is DMARC an important part of email security? As all professionals will surely agree, it’s crucial that the emails your customers and website visitors believe to be sent by you are legitimate, which is why DMARC email security is such an important part of a strong MSP email security solution. At an average of 340 billion emails sent and received each day, there are options for just about any type of message users are looking to send. To highlight one popular version, email overall has doubled in size in the last decade, which means it’s time to modernize how advertisers and marketers reach recipients. The simple truth is that it’s a crowded communication channel with endless open waves. With so many messages being transmitted daily, it’s a prime target for attackers. According to an IBM study, it takes an average of 101 days for employees to report a phishing email after the first time they encounter one. While spam filters mitigated over 94% of phishing emails in 2014 and almost 97% in 2015, the sheer volume of emails being sent limits the effect that these systems can have. How do you implement DMARC? The process of implementing Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is fairly simple, especially if you work with a DNS server administrator. Your DNS server administrator add your DMARC record to your DNS so you can begin monitoring traffic associated with your chosen domain. You will start receiving reports, which give you insight into where email traffic using that domain is coming from. In doing so, you might identify some vendors, platforms, or partners that didn’t realize were sending email on your behalf.