Companies everywhere look forward to the holidays. The handful of weeks between Halloween and New Year’s Day often bring in the lion’s share of annual revenue, especially for B2C companies.
Every year for the past few years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have grown in popularity. Twilio SendGrid has seen increases in email sent year-over-year, and shoppers eagerly await the emails that tout the flash sales that will save them big bucks. Unfortunately, bad guys are just as eager to take advantage of senders and recipients that have let their guards down.
During this time of year, fraudulent email attacks increase. Scammers and bad actors often implement different types of email fraud:
Phishing
Phishing is a volume play where scammers will send thousands and thousands of fraudulent emails in an attempt to get someone to interact with their message.
All it takes is one recipient downloading a malicious attachment, clicking an unsafe link, or disclosing private information such as credit card details or login credentials to make the effort successful.
Spear Phishing
In spear phishing, scammers will use social engineering and spoofed emails to target specific individuals in an organization. They may impersonate family members, colleagues, or business acquaintances.
Spear phishing is a specific, targeted attack on one or a select number of victims. Bad actors may impersonate CEOs or other company leaders to pressure their targets into unauthorized actions, like a request to provide confidential information in an urgent way.
How it Can Happen to You
Imagine your company is preparing for a big Cyber Monday event. But before you can launch your email campaign, a bad actor hijacks your domain, sending out thousands of emails worldwide, emails that offer a “Can’t Miss” deal. Your customers are delighted and happily hand over their credit card numbers, assuming this incredibly generous offer comes from you. What happens when they find out it’s not?
Imagine the fallout to your brand as customers are defrauded, especially during this special season. Can your brand recover from the loss of trust? This scenario is all too frequent for companies that fail to protect their domains.
Stay Vigilant and Stay Safe
We believe that all brands and organizations should prevent bad actors from taking advantage of others by sending fraudulent email. In order to prevent the repercussions of a business email compromise, you should focus on three things:
- Implement DMARC – By ensuring your domain is protected, you can prevent bad actors from using their most powerful tool to harvest credentials.
- Ensure MFA is in place – Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, is critical to making sure that even if a bad actor were to gain credentials to your organization, the MFA step in the process should prevent them from getting access.
- Encrypt your data – If bad actors were to harvest credentials, and get past an MFA login, encrypting your data should prevent them from doing much with the access.
We believe that it’s more important to stop bad actors from even getting the chance to send from your domain than to educate recipients on identifying and reporting phishing attacks.
Why Email Authentication is Critical
DMARC—Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is the gold standard for brand protection, compliance, deliverability improvement, and security.
Once DMARC is deployed, not only are your domains protected, reaching DMARC enforcement opens the door to BIMI, the Brand Indicators for Message Identification standard. BIMI, “enables organizations to use verified logos in supported email clients to indicate the message has been authenticated. This helps to increase consumer confidence in emails while providing an improved brand experience for marketers.” Imagine the ability to not only secure your domains but improve your email deliverability.
Now is time to make your domain security a priority with Valimail’s patented, highly automated, and easy-to-use DMARC solution. The holiday season is a time of giving and your organization deserves protection.