In the beginning of the year 2011, leading organizations came together to collaborate on a method that could effectively combat the issue of fraudulent email with the objective to enable senders to publish simplified policies on unauthenticated email and to allow receivers to provide authentication reporting to senders in order to improve and monitor the authentication infrastructure of their email domain. Since its implementation in the year 2012, around 80% of all the inboxes in the world have become DMARC enabled. Thus, resulting in 5.34 billion DMARC enabled inboxes.
What is DMARC?
DMARC is a protocol that uses Sender Policy Framework, (SPF) and DomainKeys identified mail (DKIM) to authenticate an email message. DMARC acts on a message in case both SPF as well as DKIM fail. The protocol protects your organization against such email threats.
Inbound emails that fail DMARC authentication do not reach in the recipient’s Inbox thus, filtering out phishing mails. DMARC is built on two existing and widely deployed email authentication techniques that include Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Two key factors of DMARC are domain alignment and reporting. Phishing emails forge the visible “From” header of emails to abuse it. DMARC’s alignment feature prevents spoofing of the “From” header address by matching “From” header domain name with the “envelope from” domain name known as the “return-path” address which is also used during an SPF check and by matching “From” header domain name with “d= domain name” in email’s DKIM signature.
Why DMARC?
DMARC enables organizations to instruct email providers that receive emails from the domains they own. They are instructed on handling unauthenticated emails through DMARC policy, thus, removing any guesswork on the process to deal with messages that fail the DMARC authentication. The protocol helps in establishing a consistent policy to deal with messages that fail to authenticate. This helps the email ecosystem in becoming more secure and trustworthy.
DMARC is different from other email authentication protocols due to its reporting function. With DMARC, you can track those who send an email on the behalf of your domain, brand and prevent spammers from using your domain against fraudulent emails. The reporting feature of DMARC means that receivers will be aware of the number of messages they have received using your domains in the ‘From: address’. They will also know about the location from which they receive these messages and whether these messages have passed SPF and DKIM checks. Setting up a DMARC policy and choosing an appropriate service provider for sending emails helps in strengthening the reputation of your brand.
DMARC enhances email deliverability, fraud protection and improves domain reputation. It will also benefit the domain management as well as compliance functions of the organization.
Therefore, for an organization that sends emails to its customers, DMARC ensures that every legitimate email is authenticated and helps in verifying the sender’s identity by the recipients’ email service provider. Fraudulent and malicious emails that appear to come from domains under the organization’s control are blocked. The organization can also include domains that do not send emails or defensively registered domains in its DMARC policy. DMARC record generator and analyzer tools like KDMARC help in defending the reputation of your domain by generating DMARC record for your organization’s domain.
How does KDMARC help?
The DMARC record generator and analyser tool, KDMARC, helps in implementing DMARC policies in your DNS that are appropriate for your email domain by configuring DKIM and SPF records for your email domain. Publishing a DMARC record protects your brand by preventing unauthenticated entities from sending email from your domain. By simply publishing a DMARC record can positively enhance your reputation.
KDMARC provides a DMARC record dashboard that gives the visibility of your outbound email traffic pattern including domain source for your email, statistics for emails that have gone through SPF and DKIM check, graphical statistics of the source of outbound traffic and a detailed analysis of each email that has been sent via your email domain.
Email is a very popular medium of communication among cyber-attackers that is used to deploy cyber-attacks. As per an estimate, the number of email users will reach 4.3 billion by the year 2022. This ultimately expands the area for cyber-attacks. Therefore, it is extremely important to adopt a security measure such as DMARC for securing your email domain.
