Almost 90% of email attacks are based on fake sender identities, either of brands (83%) or individuals (6%), according to recent research. One type of impersonation — what is known as exact-domain impersonation — occurs when scammers use a domain in the “From” field of the message that is actually owned by the organization they’re impersonating. But this type of impersonation can be stopped by email authentication.
Email authentication- Verifying that an email really does come from the domain it says it comes from (aka email authentication) is based on widely accepted standards. Over 80% of email inboxes worldwide will do authentication checks to validate that the sender is allowed to use the domain in the “From” field. It’s just technically difficult for domain owners to get this setup correctly.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is a cornerstone anti-phishing technology that prevents unauthorized use of a domain in the “From” address of email messages. This messaging standard works in conjunction with SPF to prevent spam email and other spoofing attempts by maintaining sender authentication and blocking fraudulent messages before they reach inboxes. Email authentication, also known as "authentication" or "validation," is currently supported by Gmail, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo mailboxes. In fact, more than 5 billion consumer mailboxes worldwide (and 100% of major U.S. consumer mailboxes) respect the DMARC standard.
What makes it so difficult to implement DMARC?
The details of implementing DMARC are not widely understood. It contains some subtleties that many messaging pros are not familiar with. What’s more, it relies on other standards that are themselves tricky to implement and error-prone. Emails sent from DMARC-compliant mail servers will start to be received in non-compliant mail servers beginning this summer and through the rest of 2014 as mail systems upgrade their software to support it. It’s not just small companies that have trouble implementing DMARC correctly. Even large organizations have run into trouble.
The result is forgoing all of the benefits a DMARC implementation can deliver, including protection from spam and phishing attacks, preservation of brand reputation and increased sender credibility. Anyone who has gone to the effort of implementing DMARC, but not configured it to actually enforce authentication, should ask themselves why. For this article, I asked all the Chinese companies I could think of that implemented DMARC, but had not enabled it for protection about their configuration and why they did it this way.
That it tried DMARC filtering in the past; however, mail service providers (MSPS) like Yahoo or Hotmail would often disable authentication when they saw p=none.
This made it impossible to block phishing scams. DMARC can be a real challenge to implement, especially when you consider the needs of your business and your customers. For example, say that you’re using SPF for authentication for “From:” addresses but DKIM for authenticated “Subject:” addresses. What if SPF successfully authenticates an email that comes from the Internet, but then DKIM fails to authenticate? That means that the message will fail DMARC authentication, even though the message itself was never compromised. What makes it so difficult to implement DMARC? Many companies are reluctant to move DMARC to an enforcement policy (p=reject or p=quarantine) because they have significant SPF configuration issues that they must first resolve. If you move to DMARC enforcement but still have SPF problems, you run the risk of blocking “good” email by accident.
The SPF lookup limit creates problems for authentication
SPF lookup is used to validate an email message's sender. This article shows how the SPF lookup limit creates technical problems that could lead to a denial of service attack during SPF authentication. This is often seen as a simple and easy solution to sending mail on behalf of another entity through your own servers. With SPF, you can avoid the problems associated with sending third-party mail by publishing an SPF record that authorizes only specific senders. This helps prevent your domain from being forged by unauthorized senders while allowing it to be used as needed.
If you send email from one domain, and your mail server operates on a different domain, you have to turn on Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records in the DNS. But SPF lookup is not perfect. It can’t tell whether an email was sent by a person who was permitted to act on behalf of another domain. And even when SPF lookup succeeds, there are ways it can fail if the name of your mail server changes or if one of your IP addresses is blocked.
In the fiercely competitive cyber world, it is necessary that you do your marketing well but, at the same time, pivotal that you’re aware of the basic security measures to safeguard your email sending habits.
Reverse DNS (PTR)SPF (Sender Policy Framework)DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) REVERSE DNS A DNS query for the domain name associated with a particular IP address is known as a reverse DNS lookup.
This achieves the inverse of the more widely used forward DNS lookup, which queries the DNS system for an IP address.Reverse DNS lookups seek for a PTR (pointer) record on DNS servers.
If the server doesn't have a PTR record, it won't be able to resolve a reverse lookup.
PTR records include IP addresses with their segments reversed and ‘.in-addr.arpa’ appended to them.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication protocol that allows domain owners to specify which email servers are permitted to send emails from their domain(s).
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Several problems may occur when implementing these protocols for your domain.
It is restricted, however, to identifying a forged sender claim in the email’s envelope, which is used when the email bounces.
When used in conjunction with DMARC, SPF detects email spoofing, a typical phishing scheme in which the email address or domain name of a reputable firm or trusted acquaintance is used.
This restriction helps mailbox providers use fewer resources while verifying SPF data.
If you surpass this limit, the SPF check will fail.
Each include statement in the originating SPF record and any SPF records pointed to counts toward the maximum of ten.Also Read:- How are DMARC, DKIM and SPF different from each other?You must also verify that each include statement in your SPF record is relevant and absolutely cannot be substituted by another method such as the ip4 and ip6 mechanisms.Implement ip4 and ip6 mechanismsWhen you have the opportunity, replace your include statement with the ip4 or ip6 mechanism to minimize the number of DNS lookups.
The most commonly used technical term DMARC is the abbreviation for Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance.
It is a modus operandi that makes the use of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) in order to identify the legitimacy of a message in the form of an email.
