With $25M funding round, Valimail is ready to authenticate the world’s communications
It feels like only yesterday my co-founder Peter and I started the journey that has led us to our latest milestone: a $25M Series B expansion round that will accelerate our global growth and expand our portfolio of trust-based anti-impersonation services. Our fundamental premise was (and is) simple: Email lacks authentication and therefore can’t be trusted. If we […]
U.S. senators remain vulnerable to email fraud
Trend Micro has found evidence that a Russian hacking group is attempting to break into the U.S. Senate’s email systems, Newsweek reported last week. Here’s the thing: Hackers don’t even need to hack into the Senate in order to spread confusion and doubt. They can craft emails that look exactly like Senate emails, right down […]
Why credit companies and the IRS won’t send you email
Love it or hate it, email is the most ubiquitous channel for communication ever invented (apart from the telephone), reaching half of the humans on the planet today. Yet many companies and government agencies will tell you that they never use email, or at least that they will never send you a message out of […]
5 takeaways from an Amazon phish
Today, we saw a phish posted by Lance Spitzner, a board member of the National Cyber Security Alliance. This phishing email was interesting, as Lance noted, because there was no attachment and it contained no malicious links. It looked like a perfectly legitimate email from Amazon, and every domain used in the message body and […]
76 percent of inboxes worldwide now enforce email authentication — if senders enable it
Note: This post is being jointly published by the Global Cyber Alliance and Valimail. Support for email authentication among the world’s ISPs has surged significantly in the past two years, new data shows. Email authentication, if enabled by both senders and receivers, is a powerful tool in stopping the growing phishing crisis. Ninety-one percent of cyberattacks start with a […]
Banks want to help you send money. So do phishers
A group of U.S. banks are starting to offer a service called Zelle that lets you send money to your friends using their email address or mobile number, easily, fast and free. Consumers can use Zelle send money from within their banks’ apps, and last week, Zelle launched its own app. It’s “the new, easy way […]
Why it’s so easy to fool White House officials with fake emails
It just keeps happening. A prankster who over the past few months tricked the heads of several major banks into thinking that they were having email conversations with their colleagues has struck again, this time targeting members of the Trump administration. Former communications director Anthony Scaramucci fell for the trick, just days before the end of his short-lived […]
The only email authentication solution trusted by both Hooli and Pied Piper
HBO’s Silicon Valley, which just finished its fourth season, tells the story of Pied Piper — an early stage data compression startup — and its rivalry with the tech giant Hooli. Over the course of the show, Pied Piper and Hooli have become well-known and highly recognized tech brands, even though neither company exists in real […]
CEO to CFO phishing scams are on the rise. Here’s one we caught in the act
There has been a lot of coverage in the media recently about spear phishing and the ‘CEO to CFO’ scam, and for good reason. Phishing attacks have been distressingly common for some time, and they appear to be getting worse. For a sampler, just check out security expert Brian Krebs’ many stories of executives being duped by fake emails. […]
Email Impersonation Knows No Borders
Hello…Elvis? Photo credit: Gunnshots Email impersonation scams, also known as business email compromise (BEC) or phishing attacks, have risen 20 percent in the first nine months of this year, according to the Singapore police. According to the report, those scams have cost Singaporeans S$19 million (U.S. $13.4 million), of which the police have only been […]
Can DMARC Do for Email What SSL Certificates Did for E-commerce?
Email authentication can help secure our cloud services just like SSL did our servers. Image credit: FutUndBeidl Valimail CEO Alexander García-Tobar explores this question today in InformationWeek’s Dark Reading. The article explains how email’s historic lack of authentication came about, why that’s a problem today, and how DMARC can help solve that problem. García-Tobar writes, The good […]
Government Guidance for Email Authentication Has Arrived in USA and UK
We recently discussed governmental organizations that send out warnings rather than preventing spear phishing attacks through email authentication.Therefore it’s good to see a pair of prominent governmental organizations giving clear guidance to their constituents about using DMARC to enforce authenticity of email on their domains. The British Government Digital Service announced in June an upcoming requirement that all […]