Valimail and Abnormal hosted their first joint webinar to discuss DMARC and email security to protect your business against business email compromise (BEC).
Kenneth Schwartzman, Senior Manager of Sales Engineering at Valimail, and Scott DeLuke, Enterprise Sales Engineering Manager at Abnormal, came together to discuss how their partnership can help protect companies against BEC and other email scams. Both speakers have experience in the DMARC and email security space.
Both Valimail and Abnormal offer solutions that can help protect your business. Abnormal is a cloud email security platform, and Valimail is a SaaS platform that implements DMARC enforcement. Together, they can bring even more protection for your domain and inbox.
What is DMARC?
Valimail and Abnormal offer “Defense in Depth” protection for your company and your brand for your email security stack.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is an email protocol that offers same-domain protection so that no bad agent can hack your domain.
Same-domain protection protects your brands and domains globally. It works similarly to having a boarding pass to go through TSA at an airport. Without that ID and boarding pass to confirm who you are, you won’t be able to go through to your gate.
DMARC works in a similar way. It validates the sender’s identity and stops bad emails before they can even get to your inbox. DMARC ensures that the sender of an email is actually who they say they are.
Without DMARC enforcement in place, anyone can send an email pretending to be you.
Benefits of DMARC protection
While DMARC can help lock down your domain, many other benefits come with it. For example, you’ll be able to:
- Eliminate exact-domain phishing
- Improve the shortcomings of protocols like SPF and DKIM
- Increase email deliverability
- Provides global visibility and prevents shadow IT
- Protects your brand
There has also been some research that DMARC enforcement could lead to increased deliverability when you reduce the number of spam messages your domain sends.
When you are at DMARC enforcement, you can also implement BIMI. This allows you to display your logo in the user’s inbox, which can add an increased email open rate.
DMARC in action
During the webinar, Schwartzman and DeLuke also interviewed a special guest, Stephen Burr, the Associate CIO, and Enterprise CISO at the University of Kentucky. He is a customer of both Valimail and Abnormal.
One question that Burr answered was why DMARC and email security were important to him and the University of Kentucky.
“Several reasons. One, we have a lot more shadow IT than most organizations would. But we had also seen some highly-targeted executive impersonation attacks, and they were being successful. We had people impersonating the president of our university and other high-level executives.
“Cybersecurity insurance drove our interest in both tools, but we don’t have full control over our fleet of devices, so we spend a lot more time focused on protecting humans – protecting that identity piece. Because training is never enough to protect humans, but we needed to implement technologies that stopped things from ever getting into the inbox or, if they did, quickly remove them. And that’s what drove our interest in both tools.”
Another benefit that Burr experienced when implementing email security and DMARC was that he got his weekends back. Hackers were specifically timing their attacks at inopportune times on weekends.
“When we turned on this tool, that all went away and truly stayed away more than I expected,” said Burr.
If you missed the live webinar and want to watch the full video in depth and hear more about how email security and DMARC can help, you can also view it here.
Implement DMARC today
Any business is vulnerable to these types of business email compromise and executive impersonation attacks. To prevent them, consider using a comprehensive DMARC and email security solution to lock down your domains.
Take the first step toward DMARC enforcement today, and sign up for a free Monitor account. There, you’ll have visibility into who’s sending as your domain.