[Top] 134 Protect your outbound Emails! (SPF, DKIM & DMARC)

Protect your outbound Emails! (SPF, DKIM & DMARC)

Protecting inbound emails were and remain one of the main requirements to secure environments from external threats. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium, bad emails were considered as junk email and then things had developed and turned into a SPAM “bad email”. SPAM was wasting employees’ valuable time while reviewing dozens of unwanted emails every day which sometimes reached to hundreds. Bad email “SPAM” grows and becomes dangerous! Hackers utilized email technology and start transmitting phishing emails using attachments with an embedded virus or link. Most of the old email scanners at any MTA levels (Gateway, Exchange, Lotus,…) wasn’t designed properly to look for malware inside the file e.g. PDF or DOC. However, new technology such as Sandboxing is the right solution to protect organizations from malware inside legitimate files. Nowadays inbound SPAM controlled by many technologies including IP reputation, content scoring and more. Nevertheless, sometimes phishing technique bypasses the most sophisticated protection technology and targeting top persons in the organization, this called “spear phishing” and its focus on critical business employees such as CxO, HR, IT, Financial.

Many Security companies offer perfect protection against Email Threats (SPAM, Phishing, Sandboxing…) but they mention that protection protect 99.99% of the incoming threat, and unfortunately, the 0.01 always goes to CxO ☹. And I believe having ideal protection is impossible.

The question here is: What about outbound emails? What solutions available to protect emails leaving the organization? In the past most companies were more about secure inbound emails, they only started outbound protection after they become blacklisted or spoofed. Government sector, Financial and other institutions have also concern from leaking of data, so they consider Data Loss Prevention to protect classified data from been lack.

In this article, I will discuss three kinds of anti-spoofing technology (DKIM, SPF & DMARC) those are considered as kinds of outbound protection and used to enforce the integrity of the message. DKIM used to sign emails at gateway level, SPF used to register all outbound email system and DMARC is to see how DKIM and SPF are working and enforced.

Continue on my blog to know more about DKIM, SPF, and DMARC) https://blog.mahouk.net/2019/06/protect-your-outbound-emails.html