A Complete Overview of DMARC Record

threatcop
4 min readOct 24, 2019
Is your domain secure with DMARC record?

Is your domain 100% secure? Are you sure about emails that are landing in your inbox aren’t spoofed or phished? Do you have a DMARC record to authenticate your emails? In a recent survey, it was found that about 91% of the cyber-attacks are deployed with phishing attacks.

According to a survey by computerweekly.com, out of top 100 brands across the globe, more than 95% of them haven’t adopted DMARC protection. Without a proper DMARC record and protection, various renowned companies have become targets of cyber-attacks. Lately in 2019, BEC scams were accounted for creating over $12 billion of loss.

Emails attacks are not only increasing radically but also, have started evolving into more dangerous forms of attacks. A 2018 data breach investigation report stated that around 30% of the phished emails were opened by targeted users. Imagine out of 30% those users, 10% of the victims are working in your organization? Or what if you could be one of the vulnerable targeted users too!

Hackers constantly look out for ways to get into networks either through phishing or other social engineering ways. With the increasing use of email in every organization today, it has become an affordable access for invasion. Emails are easy to spoof and are key to access any system or device by corruptly extracting user’s information.

DMARC was introduced in 2012 as an email authentication protocol to reduce the risk of cyber-attacks. It is considered to be an industry standard for email verification to prohibit attacks which are malicious emails sent using counterfeit address.

All US federal agencies and all UK government departments have been commanded to adopt DMARC as a part of National Cyber Security Centre program, the Active Cyber Defense. The purpose to adopt DMARC record protection is to focus only on the genuine email aspect. Who wouldn’t want a guaranteed email delivery rate of 98%?

What is a DMARC Record?

For marketing executives, DMARC is a dream come true. Implementation of DMARC record makes marketing campaigns and transfer of legitimate emails far more efficient. DMARC is a DNS TXT record which is published for a domain to control messages which fail the authentication.

The purpose to generate DMARC record is basically for:

  • Commanding recipient server to either approve the message to deliver or quarantine the message or reject the message.
  • Send reports to email addresses with data regarding all messages seen from domain.
Policies of DMARC

If domain has published a DMARC record, the recipient mail server chooses one of three the options from allow, quarantine or reject to implement. DMRAC record consists of variables which include the preferred DMARC policy. It isn’t complex to generate a DMARC record but it is important to use correct syntax according to DMARC standard.

How Does DMARC Record Work?

To create a DMARC record is not a laborious task if it is implemented with the right tool. DMARC records are published in DNS with sub domain label _dmarc, such as: _dmarc.abc.com. Furthermore, this is compared to DKIM at selector._dmoinkey.abc.com and SPF at abc.com.

The TXT resource records consists of name=value tags, separated by semicolons.

For example:

v=DMARC1; p=none; sp=quarantine; pct=100; rua=mailto:dmarcreport@abc.com;

These variables stand for:

  • v means version
  • p means policy
  • sp means sub domain policy
  • pct means percent of “bad” emails on which DMARC policy is applied
  • rua means the URI, required for sending aggregate reports

Various coding parameters are involved to generate DMARC record and that takes a long time to process. There are advanced tools like KDMARC which help in easy and better implementation of DMARC record in no time.

DMARC Record Check with KDMARC

Products like KDMARC are highly reliable when it comes to the protection against spoofing practices. It is the best tool to implement and generate DMARC record. With the help of KDMARC, business domain administrators can easily access the security statistics of their emails. Apart from that, this tool performs real-time action over the sources of threat incurred.

For someone setting up a DMARC record for the first time, might experience the process as time-taking tedious task. In fact, there could be chances of improper configuration of DMARC which in turn would fail the whole objective of email authentication. To save your time as well as set up and create DMARC record, KDMARC offers the dynamic SPF and dynamic DMARC.

With the help of dynamic DMARC, you can instantly change or reset all the policies instantly and automatically. On the other hand, with the help of its dynamic SPF feature, one can white-list and blacklist IP addresses as well.

Generate DMARC Record with KDMARC
Secure your domain with KDMARC

List of Exclusive Benefits You Get With KDMARC:

  1. Increases rate of email engagement — KDMARC secures emails from cyber-attacks which in turn enhances the rate of email deliverability.
  2. Prevention from malware attacks — It is the most entrusted tool to prevent malware and ransomware attacks.
  3. Complete domain security — KDMARC outstands as a tool when it comes to full security of your domain.
  4. Organized email structure policy — Get the best email authentication protocol service to deal messages that fail to authenticate or are suspicious.
  5. Security from brand abuse — With KDMARC, there are zero chances of domain name forgery and misuses of your organization’s brand name.

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threatcop

Threatcop is a cybersecurity company that provides security solutions to businesses to protect them against email-based attacks and social engineering attacks.