This blog post covers key takeaways from our 2021 Industry Cyber-Exposure Report (ICER): Fortune 500. Original analysis for these findings was conducted by Kwan Lin.
We all know and love—or at least begrudgingly rely upon—email. It is a pillar of modern communications, but is unfortunately also highly susceptible to being leveraged as a mechanism for malicious actions, such as spoofing or phishing.
A core concern regarding email is the authenticity of the source, and in recent years, Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) has arisen as the preeminent email validation system. DMARC builds upon the foundations of two older email authentication systems, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which respectively check for mail-server authorization (“Is the sender authorized?”) and email integrity based on key signatures (“Was the content altered?”). The various components of DMARC can serve to mitigate direct threats as well as potential reputational damage, such as spoofed emails intended to mislead partners, suppliers, or customers.
A properly implemented DMARC system can identify illegitimate emails and define how they should be handled. DMARC can be configured to handle emails of suspect provenance with different degrees of severity, depending on the aggressiveness of IT administrators. The DMARC policy options include:
`None`, where suspect emails are reported to a designated email address that serves to monitor DMARC notifications.
`Quarantine`, where suspect emails are punted to the spam folder and a report of its receipt is delivered to the monitoring email address.
`Reject`, where in addition to notifying the monitoring email address, suspect emai ..
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