Is your business domain protected from email spoofing?

Overview

Unless your domain is properly configured to prevent it, virtually anyone can send an email that appears to come from your business.

The message can display your company name, use your domain in the sender address, and arrive in a customer’s, vendor’s, or employee’s inbox looking as though it came directly from you. For an attacker, this can be an easy and effective way to make a phishing or business email compromise scam look legitimate.

The consequences can be significant. A spoofed message could ask a customer to change payment instructions, request sensitive information from an employee, or impersonate an executive asking someone to purchase gift cards or transfer funds. Even when the fraudulent email does not directly compromise an account, it can damage customer trust and your company’s reputation.

The good news is that there are established email-security standards that can significantly reduce this risk.

Preventative Actions

There are three important records you can configure on your domain to help protect your business from spoofing:

SPF — Sender Policy Framework:

A record that identifies which mail servers are authorized to send email on behalf of your domain. In plain English, SPF helps answer: “Is this server allowed to send email for my business?”

DKIM — DomainKeys Identified Mail:

Adds a digital signature to outgoing email that receiving systems can use to verify that the message came through an authorized source and was not altered in transit. Think of DKIM as a tamper-evident seal for your email.

DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance:

Tells receiving mail systems what to do when an email claiming to be from your domain fails SPF or DKIM authentication. DMARC can also provide reports that help you identify legitimate and potentially fraudulent email activity using your domain.

These three controls work together. SPF and DKIM help establish whether an email is legitimate, while DMARC provides the policy that tells the receiving system how to handle messages that fail authentication.

Unfortunately, many businesses either do not have all three configured or have them configured only partially. A domain may have SPF and DKIM records in place, for example, but have DMARC configured only for monitoring. In that situation, suspicious messages may be identified and reported without actually being blocked.

Recommendations

We highly recommend checking the current email-security configuration for your business domains.

First, determine whether SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are properly configured and whether they account for all of the legitimate services your business uses to send email. This is particularly important if your company uses cloud-based email, marketing platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, accounting applications, or other third-party services that send messages on your behalf.

Once you understand your current configuration, the next step is to determine whether your DMARC policy is providing meaningful protection. A policy that only monitors suspicious activity may give you visibility, but it does not necessarily prevent spoofed messages from reaching their intended recipients.

Moving toward a policy that instructs receiving systems to reject unauthorized messages can provide a much stronger layer of protection—but it should be done carefully to avoid blocking legitimate business email.

Email authentication is only one part of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, but it is an important and often-overlooked control. Properly configured domains can make it substantially harder for attackers to impersonate your business and use your reputation to target customers, employees, and partners.

Contact Us Today

to learn how we can help securely manage your domains, evaluate your email authentication configuration, and identify opportunities to reduce your overall IT security risk. Powersolution is here to help.

Call us on 201-493-1414 for a consultation!

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