Proactive Measures for Protecting Your Sender Reputation

To keep their computers, accounts, websites, and mailboxes safe and secure, Internet users apply firewalls, antivirus tools, and anti-spam filters. Companies selling goods online and running online services, use anti-fraud systems to prevent fraudulent orders, account creations, abuse, and misuse of their infrastructure.

In 2020, the question of security in the computer space has become as vital as never before. With the spreading of COVID-19, a lot of people have been locked at home, having to start working remotely and use the computer and Internet more actively. Thus, bad guys took the time to do their dark deeds.

According to the data collected by Statista, nearly 250,000 people in the US became victims of email phishing, vishing, and smishing in 2020, making it the most common type of cybercrime.

The worst thing is that you may become a victim of cybercrime without even knowing it. This is the email spoofing case — when your website domain or email domain is used by spammers to send spam and phishing emails.

What is Email Spoofing?

Email spoofing is a technique used by spammers to trick email recipients making them think the message came from an organization or person they know. The sender forges the sender’s email address which a recipient sees in the email client. If it’s a name and email address they recognize, they’re more likely to trust it.

Email spoofing is possible because outgoing email servers cannot verify whether the sender’s email address is legitimate or spoofed. Receiving servers and antimalware tools can help detect and filter spoofed messages, but not all email services have email authentication protocols in place.

Recipients can review the email headers of every message to determine whether the sender’s address is forged or not, but no one does it in reality, which plays into the hands of bad guys. People are used to trusting what they see in front of their eyes. So they open emails, download malware attachments, click malicious links, send personal data, and even wire funds.

How Does Email Spoofing Hurt Sender Reputation?

While some people fall for the bait of phishing emails, others consider them to be spam and send a complaint showing ISP that messages sent from your domain are not wanted. User complaints are one of the major factors that ISP look at when calculating sender reputation. The more complaints, the lower sender reputation, and the more legitimate messages go to Spam.

The worst consequence of email spoofing attacks is blocked messages. When an email service provider sees an excessive number of user complaints or when your sender reputation becomes bad, it starts blocking emails from your domain. The inability to deliver important messages to the Inbox of your email subscribers leads to financial and reputational losses.

How to Protect Your Domain from Spoofing

The good news is that technologies don’t stand still and, at present, domain owners can use email authentication mechanisms to avoid or mitigate damage produced by email spoofing attacks. These mechanisms are:

– SPF (Sender Policy Framework). It works by requiring a domain owner to add a TXT record to DNS that names the IP addresses authorized to send emails from a given domain. The receiving server checks the SPF record to validate the email sender. By itself, SPF is not a perfect protection mechanism as failures can happen due to human mistakes and DNS issues.

– DKIM (Domain Key Identified Mail). This method also works by adding a TXT record to DNS. DKIM uses a pair of cryptographic keys to sign an outgoing message and validate an incoming message to make sure that the message wasn’t altered in transit. The weak side of this email authentication method is that the message can be forwarded without breaking the validity of the DKIM signature. This technique is referred to as a “replay attack”.

– DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). This method ties the two methods mentioned above and gives the highest level of protection when set to enforcement. DMARC is applied by adding a DMARC TXT record to a domain’s DNS. If an email receiver sees that a message passed DMARC authentication, it delivers it to the target recipient. When a message doesn’t pass DMARC authentication, the email receiver looks at the policy in the DMARC record to know what to do with the message.

Read: Email Authentication: the Ultimate Guide

Benefits of DMARC Authentication

Not only does DMARC prove the authenticity of an email message, but it also gives more advantages to senders who apply it:

Read the full story on GlockApps blog.