The Alarming Rise of Unsecured Emails
Email is known to be one of the fastest-growing methods of interpersonal communication. Majorly all business communications that take place nowadays are done via emails. Even from a small piece of contract information to the latest sales reports, every confidential data is mostly shared via emails.
Although, no matter how crucial and confidential data is shared, these electronic-based communication mails are highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks which later become a source of exploitation. Even a single wrong click can expose the most secretive information of a company which can be either financial statements or sensitive business negotiation.
Lately, several forms of cyber-attacks have taken place because of the lack of email security. Statistic of 2019 states that Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams have accounted for the loss of over $12 billion in 2019!
30% of phishing emails hold the tendency to bypass the default security measures where 4% of these emails turn out to be phishing emails. These facts clearly state the importance of email authentication and why it should be one of the most basic parameters of an organization’s security framework!
What is the Best Way to Authenticate Emails?
Almost every malicious/phishing email comes from a forged or fake email address. Forging email addresses or spoofing emails are some common practices that hackers use for misdirecting the receiving email server. Such cybercrimes encourage these hackers to continuously send phishing emails laden with spam, virus, or malware.
Further, these cybercrimes lead to the slow working of email systems while the most reputable mail systems tend to directly block such servers that even slightly resemble a spam sender. That’s something no one would want to happen with their organization’s email domain. Protect your customers, brand, and your business from email-based cyber-attacks, by authenticating your emails first.
The most effective way to prevent spammers from spoofing your email address and potentially degrading your domain name is to create and check for SPF record in your DNS zone. For those who don’t know “what is SPF record”, the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication protocol that allows senders to identify whether which IP addresses are authorized for sending emails on behalf of a domain.
Prevent Email Spoofing & Improve E-mail Deliverability Rate with SPF Record Check
Email authentication has become more important due to the ever-evolving email-phishing attacks. Sender Policy Framework (SPF), an email authentication technique is designed to detect and prevent spammers from sending messages on behalf of the legitimate organization’s domain. With the help of SPF, an organization can publish the authorized mail servers.
An SPF record is published in the Domain Name Service which contains a list of the authorized email servers that can send an email on the behalf of the name of your domain. If an email sender sends an email on the behalf of your domain but is not listed in the record section, then that email may not be considered as a legitimate email and will be further rejected by the email receiver.
Moreover, if a domain publishes an SPF record, there are fewer chances of spammers and phishers trying to forge emails, while pretending to be from that domain. This is because the forged emails have more chances of being caught in the spam filters that check the SPF record.
Therefore, SPF-protected domains are less attractive to spammers and phishers. And since an SPF-protected domain is less likely to attract spoofed addresses, the chances of being blacklisted by the spam filters would be less. Henceforth, the legitimate email from the domain will more likely to get through it.
KDMARC: The SPF Record Checker
SPF record serves as an extra security layer when implemented along with DMARC and DKIM, which reduces backscatter bounces and email error notifications. It ensures that emails are secured against any type of spoofing practice and are delivered without any trouble.
Tools like KDMARC analyses your organization’s SPF record and ensures that the report helps the experts present within your organization to place the record accordingly for the organization. With KDMARC your organization can stay away from the sources that are trying to forge their domain names.
KDMARC comes with the most innovative and beneficial features like:
- Dynamic SPF: Elimination and whitelisting of IP addresses
- Dynamic DKIM: Authenticates and manages multiple source keys
- Instant changes in policies through dynamic DMARC
With unparalleled features like these, you can effortlessly improve the email domain reputation of your organization. Moreover, you get 100% security against the misuse of your email domain and email spoofing practices.
