The extra mile
It’s good to know that we’re going that extra mile to make your emails the most secure around.
You might think that an email address is just as email address – what’s the difference between one and another? However, behind the scenes, lots of extra stuff is going on. Our main email technician says:
“One of the things I set up wherever possible for our email clients are the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records in DNS”. If you’re wondering what this means…
- SPF records list which servers are legitimate email senders for a particular domain.
- DKIM signs email sent from an account and breaks if the email is modified.
- DMARC is a published policy telling recipient mail servers how to treat received email which fails SPF checking or DKIM checking. The recipient mail server does not have to abide by this policy but more and more are. Recipient mail servers also report back to an address listed in the DMARC record on whether an email has passed or failed checks and how it was treated.
Happy Customer
The benefits of doing these extra things was demonstrated recently when a malicious spoofer started p
utting one of our customer’s email addresses as the sender for large volumes of spoof emails. Because our technician had put the checks in place, the fact that the emails were failing SPF and DKIM checks showed up straight away. Having spotted the problem, a few changes to SPF and DMARC records ensured that mail servers were instructed to quarantine these emails. Within 2 days the spoofed emails were no longer being sent – presumably the spoofer saw that it was failing and gave up. Result!
What the experts say
“The spam problem would not only be significantly reduced, it’d probably almost go away,” argues Paul Edmunds, the head of technology from the cybercrimes division of the U.K.’s National Crime Agency — suggesting that more businesses should be using DMARC, an email validation system that uses both the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
“Edmunds argued, if DMARC was rolled out everywhere in order to verify if messages come from legitimate domains, it would be a major blow to spam distributors and take a big step towards protecting organizations from this type of crime…” reports ZDNet. “However, according to a recent survey by the Global Cyber Alliance, DMARC isn’t widely used and only 15% of cybersecurity vendors themselves are using DMARC to prevent email spoofing.
Earlier this month America’s FTC also reported that 86% of major online businesses used SPF to help ISPs authenticate their emails — but fewer than 10% have implemented DMARC.
STOP PRESS
BT no longer accept emails from domains with no SPF records. A client recently had problems with emails being rejected from a known supplier of theirs. Turned out the problem was that the supplier (a large national chain) was not using SPF records. It’s clearly becoming more and more important to get on top of this issue…
Choose datamills connect email
If you’d like to know more about how to make your emails as secure as possible, click here, or give us a call on 0114 287 0510.