Without knowing it, your company domain might be contributing to the spread of malicious mail.

The pandemic of harmful emails such as Spam, phishing and malware, we all receive them. Fewer if you take action to find a consultant or your email provider is proactively stopping it. Google blocks almost 15 billion unwanted emails a year so that they do not reach customers. Companies therefore receive quite a bit less spam, much less than before.

The nature of what gets through has become quite a bit more harmful.

Where does it come from and how can we protect ourselves to stop it?

The Internet community, 

Is an active player in cooperation with the law enforcement, for the amount of illegal shops and domains, which only intend to carry out economic crime, Work is being done on a shorter process for closing domains that are reported for crime.

The financial criminals

Companies are increasingly experiencing that they are being exploited as senders of unwanted email. In this situation the domain cannot just be shut down, there is a legal company behind it. The financial criminals have found an open back door, a hole in the email systems. Emails sent requesting money or sensitive information are considered to come from the sender domain, not the criminals. It's a shitstorm that can be difficult to get rid of.

Domain reputation, 

helps determine the company's ability to deliver to the inbox. There is no reset, only over time the reputation improves again. Many companies have no idea of the scope until they experience major problems with sending email, and are already listed in one or more spam servers.

It is the necessary insight into protecting their domain from unauthorised use that the companies fail at.

Domain Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Compliance is an email authentication protocol. It is designed to allow email domain owners to protect their domain from unauthorised use.

We are actively working with a group of our customers who want data-driven growth potential, with a retention period of 90 days. A picture of their outgoing mail flow shows the following: - There is too much trust in the providers, responsible for correct delivery - The last three months we have helped block 16.400 malicious emails from being sent from their domains. - With Domain Based Message Authentication, you get a data-driven insight model to correct all of your data sources to be authenticated correctly, after which you will be able to add IT security to protect your Brand.

Google and Yahoo are taken steps to close the DNSabuse gap

Announcements from Google and Yahoo, which means that many companies (bulk senders) are now forced to have a look at authentication and DMARC. “New Gmail protections for a safer, less spammy inbox” Oct 03, 2023, Starting in 2024, Google requires bulk senders to authenticate their emails.

The payment card industry security standards council, 

 DMARC will be mandatory, right approach to stop the DNSabuse

By March 2025 implementing DMARC will be mandatory according to the requirements published by the latest payment card industry security standards council (PCI DSS v4.0), This will have a significant impact on industries like retail food healthcare or any industry that processes credit or debit card payments. This will be an essential step forward for email security. Still, it's worth noting that DMARC implementation and enforcement isn't easy, and depending on your organisation's scale this might take some time while keeping in mind that audits will begin next year in June…

Data from DomainCrawler 

The online brand protection industry has gone a long way to develop tools to monitor the web, social media, and marketplace. However, there is another piece of data that brands should pay attention to. Namely, the Registrant Email record in the WHOIS. Scammers and fraudsters can use the name of a brand in their domain registrant email to trick users into believing that the message is legitimate. This is because the registrant email address is often used as the sender address for emails from the domain. If a person controls the registrant email address, they could send emails that appear to be from the brand, even if they are not authorised to do so. For example, according to the data from DomainCrawler, there are 594 domain names that contain the name burberry in the Registrant email record. Of course, in reality, most of those belong to the brand, but not all. Closer examination may lead to the discovery of domain names like letsjumpny.com which has burberry in the registrant email was created less than three months ago and is inactive. Signals like these require closer inspection for possible domain abuse. 

There are almost 350 million registered domain names on the Internet right now. However, according to DomainCrawler, only 5.09% and 35.07% of registered domain names utilize DMARC and SPF records respectively. These low adoption rates are concerning, as DMARC and SPF are essential tools for protecting domain names from email spoofing and phishing attacks.

More info in our previous article:

70% of companies failing to achieve the true potential of their marketing

70-companies-failing-achieve-true-potential-marketing-jens-sonnenborg

To understand how to Protect your Brand and Domain Reputation 

We invite you to short LIVE DEMO We also offer to make a Domain security rapport. You can then continue the data-driven growth potential journey with us.

Author:

Jens Sonnenborg