The number of domains using an anti-spoofing technology known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, or DMARC, topped 2.7 million in 2020, yet most domains still fail to specify a policy to delete or quarantine unauthenticated email, according to data from security firms published over the last month.
During the pandemic, email scams and phishing attacks that purported to be from the World Health Organization (WHO) widely targeted businesses and government agencies. DMARC foils one component of such attacks, when the attacker spoofs an organization in the sender line. As of December 2020, more than 2.7 million domains published a DMARC record, up 43% during the last year, according to the latest adoption report on DMARC.org, based on data from Farsight Security, a cybersecurity intelligence firm.
Still, two-thirds of those domains do not specify any policy for unauthenticated email, instead essentially monitoring the situation, according to the Farsight data. With ransomware and non-spoofed phishing attacks increasingly common, companies are tackling those issues that have the most impact on their risks, says Ben April, chief technology officer for Farsight Security.
"We will continue to see it slowly creep up for a while," he says. "It's a trickle of adoption mainly based on companies asking, 'What is going to kill me next?' That sort of risk analysis determines what important threats the company needs to focus on next."
DMARC allows an organization to specify how recipients should handle unauthenticated messages using information inserted into its domain-name record. Using two other standards — Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM) — for verifying the authenticity of a message and chec ..
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