What is Domain Spoofing?

21st-century technology has allowed Cybercriminals to use
sophisticated and undetectable methods for malicious
activities.

In 2020 alone, a survey revealed that 65% of US-based
companies were vulnerable to email phishing and impersonation
attacks. This calls for upgrading your organization’s
security with DMARC, which if not implemented, will enable
cyber-attackers to:

• Instigate money transfers from vulnerable employees via spoofed
  emails while impersonating senior executives in your company
• Send fake invoices to your employees and partners
• Deal in illegal goods via your domain
• Spread Ransomware
• Impersonate customer support to steal confidential customer or
  partner information

Such situations can have long-lasting consequences on your
business. From inflicting a blow on thebrand’s reputation and
credibility among its partners and customer base to loss of
valuable company information and millions of dollars, the risks are
countless.

What is Domain Spoofing?

Domain spoofing is a very common form of a security breach
wherein a cybercriminal tries to impersonate a company’s business
email domain to carry out a range of malicious activities by
forging the sender’s address.

The attackers create credible From fields in the emails
that they send out so as to increase the chances of them looking
legitimate and thereby being opened by receivers. The goal of
domain spoofing is to trick users into believing that the email is
coming from an authenticated source and manipulating them into
interacting with the fraudulent email embedded with malicious links
as if it were legitimate.

Wondering how attackers manage that? This is facilitated by a
lack of email authentication protocol in the organization. Email
domains generally operate via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol),
which is a communication protocol that enables the transfer of mail
via digital platforms. However, it has its own limitations, such as
the lack of an automated email authentication mechanism programmed
in it. Cybercriminals take advantage of this vulnerability to spoof
email domains and send out fraudulent emails, posing to be you.

Email spoofing can have severe consequences and can lead to the
loss of confidential company information or instigate money
transfers from partners or employees while posing to be senior
executives of the company. We can better understand the threat
landscape by taking a few real-life examples:

• In October of 2020, the US Census Bureau deployed a warning
  against hackers who were attempting to spoof their domains, using
  them to launch phishing scams and credential thefts. They provided
  insight into a whopping 63 newly registered domains impersonating
  the US Census Bureau.
• A New York-based trading firm in mid-August stated to have lost
  $6.9 million in a BEC scam in May 2020, and more than 80% of
  companies in the US have claimed to have been hit with Business
  Email Compromise post-pandemic.
• The incurrence of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the month of
  November 2020 has further heightened the chances of domain spoofing
  of popular retail stores in the guise of attractive offers and gift
  cards sent to their customer base by attackers.

How Can DMARC Protect Your Business?

DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and
Conformance, is anemail authentication protocol created with the
objective of securing business domains and brands from spoofing
attacks. DMARC enforces the use of a combination ofSPF andDKIM
email authentication technologies to ensure only real emails are
delivered to the end receivers.

Without DMARC, all emails sent from the email domain of your
business reaches the receiver’s inbox without any security check or
validation. However, with DMARC, the receiver’s Mail Transfer Agent
(MTA) looks up the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records of the domain name
to authenticate the sender. Once the sender is verified or
authenticated, the mail lands in the receiver’s inbox.

By authenticating all emails sent from your domain, you not only
prevent imposters from misusing your domain name to carry out
malicious activities and launder money but also improves the email
deliverability and make your customers and partners respond to your
emails more promptly.

Implementing email authentication protocols at your organization
helps you stay updated on the changing tactics of attackers,
protect your company databases, and prevent financial or
information losses.

In order to stay updated on the ever-changing tactics of
cybercriminals, opting for DMARC monitoring and timely reporting
mechanisms is as imperative as simply opting for DMARC enforcement
to ensure visibility and improve email deliverability. This is why
you should confide in a tool likePowerDMARC.

PowerDMARC not only incorporates mechanisms for email
authentication with DMARC but provides a scalable range of
additional features that far exceed the usual facilities:

Automated Email Authentication

• PowerDMARC’s multi-faceted DMARC analyzer
  tool^[1] eases up the process of
  shifting to DMARC enforcement from p=none to p= reject/quarantine
  in no time! It nullifies the fear of breaking the email system by
  making the enforcement process speedy and easy, providing complete
  visibility and analysis to help system administrators optimize
  their SPF/DKIM sending sources to comply with DMARC policy.
• PowerBIMI provides a hosted BIMI Record^[2] service by assigning
  your company logo next to the email so that receivers can easily
  demarcate between fake and real emails. 3 easy steps, upload your
  logo, generate the automated BIMI DNS records and publish them at
  your domain DNS.Increased Visibility
• Implementing PowerDMARC helps you receive daily reports on the
  mails that are passing and failing the security checks and DMARC
  verification, with DNS alerts in case of miss configurations in
  SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and BIMI, along with real-time forensic
  alerts.
• The 24/7 monitoring facilities by security experts keep an eye
  on all thesending sources and detect unauthorized senders trying to
  impersonate you, with a real-time alert system for reporting
  spoofing attacks and viewing the abuser’s history of domain
  abuse.
• The real-time DMARC monitoring tool offers complete visibility
  to your email domain, monitoring email spoofing attacks taking
  place worldwide via threat mapping.

Forensic Encryption

PowerDMARC empowers you to get detailed visibility on your DMARC
RUF Failure reports (Forensics) along with its Threat Intelligence
and AI engine. It also allows you toencrypt the feedback headers
and mail headers of your DMARC Forensic RUF reports using your own
PGP keys to ensure absolute privacy.

PowerSPF

Every time your SPF record uses mechanisms to specify receiving
servers how to handle an email, it results in a DNS lookup. For
preventing DoS attacks, the number of DNS lookups per SPF record is
limited to a maximum of 10. Therefore for organizations relying on
multiple third-party vendors, crossing the 10 DNS lookup limit is
unavoidable.

As soon as this happens, even authorized inbound emails will
fail SPF check! PowerSPF^[3]
enables you to add or remove senders in your SPF record with ease
so that you always stay under the 10 DNS lookup limit. It resolves
the “permerror” issue, SPF record errors, limits, and configuration
problems on a single platform.

MSSP Program

PowerDMARC is a multi-tenant MSSP DMARC SaaS
platform^[4] that offers
MSP/MSSP/partners the capability to resell the service with full
control to manage and provision their own customers.

By partnering up with PowerDMARC, you can gain access to a
multi-tenant dashboard along with special pricing, premium support
options, and independent optimization facilities.

To learn more about how experts can help you protect your
organization from BEC and spoofing attacks with the help of
PowerDMARC, book a demo or sign up for a free DMARC
trial^[5] today!