How to prevent payroll diversion scams
Don’t let payroll scams phish your paycheck away! Business email compromise (BEC) comes in many varieties. You’ve probably heard about BEC in the form of executive impersonation attacks, resulting in wrongful corporate wire transfers or W-2s making it into the wrong hands, but BEC is a risk for all employees, not just executives. One of the […]
Federal compliance with email authentication directive continues to grow
The deadline for compliance is past, but the number of federal domains protecting themselves against email impersonation continues to grow. As of this week, 57 percent of all federal domains are protected by strict DMARC policies in compliance with government requirements. That’s a sharp jump from 50 percent at the beginning of the month — and we […]
What’s your industry’s email fraud protection rate?
Valimail regularly queries many millions of domains for the presence of published DMARC and SPF records, and performs detailed analysis on any records that we find. For our recent
$12.5 billion: The cost of email impersonation (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg)
Email impersonation is in the news again. On Friday, the news hit that the Department of Justice had indicted 12 Russians on counts of attempting to interfere with the 2016 election in the U.S. At least one of the indicted is accused of using spear-phishing techniques to gain entry to the Democratic National Committee. It was […]
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 […]