Deciphering DMARC reports is complex as it requires understanding the XML structure and key components within the report. You have to analyze the IP address and understand the failures. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can go about it.
Lately, DMARC adoption has been reflecting an upward trend, underscoring the increasing awareness about email security, especially after Google and Yahoo’s announcements. Roughly 20 million domains are already using DMARC, although many users are still stuck at the p=none policy, which is like moving two steps forward and one step back.
Google Workspace encourages domain owners to use the three email authentication protocols, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, to ensure outgoing emails are properly authenticated. This reduces the security gaps; otherwise, threat actors can exploit them to send phishing and spoofing emails from your domains. Moreover, from February 2024, Google has mandated DMARC deployment for regular and bulk email senders, urging domain owners or administrators to create a DMARC record in their DNS settings and specifying policies to handle emails that fail SPF and/or DKIM checks.
While most domain owners prefer receiving DMARC aggregate and forensic reports on internal email addresses, some want to have them in external inboxes. Internal email addresses refer to those belonging to the same domain for which the DMARC record is created. For example, if your organization’s domain is example.com, then an internal domain email address would be something like employee@example.com. On the other hand, external email addresses are the ones not belonging to that domain. For example, department@otherdomain.com.
With sophisticated cyberattacks looming over your email landscape, you need to employ the latest techniques that not only protect your communications but also enhance the security posture, and DMARC fits the bill! Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is an email authentication protocol that helps you do just that! It protects your domains against spoofing, phishing, and other email-based frauds.
Ever since Google and Yahoo rolled out new email-sending policies that mandate organizations that send bulk marketing emails every day to deploy DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance), organizations across the world have been quite proactive in meeting these new standards. The wave of DMARC adoption was such that over 800,000 new DMARC records were created by March 2024. And just like the rest of the world, organizations in Ireland also jumped on this bandwagon.
Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a regulation by the European Union that came into force on January 17, 2023. It makes the financial institutions and entities within the finance sector more resilient towards fraud. It strengthens banks, insurance companies, investment firms, and other financial service providers to get back on their feet after major losses and disruptions.
By now, you might have heard a lot about how DMARC reports are crucial for your organization to gain insights into your email traffic and learn how your authentication protocols are waging against phishing and spoofing attempts. They reveal the harsh truth, that is, not all emails claiming to be from your domain are legitimate. While you’re decoding DMARC reports, have you ever looked into the sources of these emails?
Email authentication isn’t simply about verifying senders; it’s about protecting your organization from phishing, spoofing, and other email-based attacks and, most importantly, ensuring that your email campaigns reach their intended recipients. An email authentication protocol that ticks all of these boxes is DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.
Recently, Microsoft users received data breach notification emails, which, however, were marked as spam by Microsoft’s own security tools.
DMARC helps prevent spoofed emails from bypassing spam filtering, but it’s just one part of a broader anti-spam strategy. Not all DMARC reports are equal; some show detailed recipient responses, while others only indicate success or failure. Understanding why a message failed is as important as knowing if it did.
DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is one of the most important email authentication protocols that helps protect your email domains from phishing, spoofing, and other email-based cyber threats. Perhaps this is why it has now become a norm for organizations that send bulk emails to comply with.
DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, is an email authentication protocol that protects your domains from being misused by cyber attackers and improves email deliverability to ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients instead of landing in their spam folders.
Businesses are now being mindful of protecting their domains with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, but what about the times when you send emails from your subdomains? As a domain owner or administrator, you create a DMARC record that instructs how email-receiving servers should evaluate incoming emails from your domain to check their legitimacy. This process flows smoothly when domains are included, but it gets a bit complicated with the involvement of subdomains.
DMARC has been saving brands from being victims of phishing and spoofing attacks, and lately, its adoption has been more embraced than ever. After the email authentication requirements announced by Google and Yahoo, all major email service providers are also encouraging the deployment of DMARC.
Is the card payment system of your business secure enough to keep cyber predators at bay? Not as much as you think!
Every email marketer strives towards one thing— ensuring that their emails not only reach their recipients’ inboxes but also engage and convert. This is what we call email deliverability, the measure of how successful an email is at reaching the recipient’s inbox, and it’s a metric that can make or break your email marketing efforts.
How safe are your emails? You might think that your email is just a simple tool for communication, but it’s actually a potential entry point for cybercriminals. With over 3.4 million malicious emails sent daily, which is 1.2% of the total email traffic, the chances of your email being one of them are not very bleak! Now, add to this the vast range of threats ranging from phishing to ransomware and malware, each designed to infiltrate, deceive, and damage to the best of its capabilities.
Did you know that there’s more to DMARC implementation than just the policies that determine what happens to emails that don’t pass authentication checks (SPF and DKIM)? It is the reporting feature of DMARC that sets the tone for the overall effectiveness of your email security strategy. DMARC reports offer comprehensive insights into how emails claiming to come from your domain are being handled by their recipients and the ones that fail DMARC, SPF, or DKIM validation, providing a clear view of both legitimate and fraudulent activities.
DMARC has already gained the attention it deserves, owing to its efficiency in combatting phishing and spoofing attacks. But the journey wasn’t fast and steady from the beginning. It all started when SPF came into play, followed by the amalgamation of Yahoo’s DomainKeys and Cisco’s Identified Internet Mail (IIM). This blog covers the journey of all three email authentication protocols in detail.