Glu Mobile & Valimail: Leading mobile game developer & publisher scores with DMARC enforcement

The Business

With a history spanning over a decade, Glu is a leading creator of mobile games. Glu’s diverse portfolio features top-grossing and award-winning titles available worldwide on various platforms including the App Store and Google Play. One of Glu’s core values is ‘Trust Each Other,’ and the company has extended that value by creating a trusted email ecosystem through a layered approach that includes email authentication, a key component of which is DMARC enforcement.

The challenge

Dominic Martinelli, Vice President of Customer and Technical Operations, and John Fox, Senior Security Engineer, lead the team responsible for IT, DevOps, cyber security, corporate infrastructure, incident breach management, security controls and customer care. They were eager to implement email authentication, including DMARC enforcement, but when they scoped doing the work themselves, it was clear that it would require re-allocating resources from other initiatives. They decided to evaluate other options.

DMARC was frequently a topic of discussion, but the conversation always came back to the amount of work that implementing it and the associated standards would take. “DMARC was pretty challenging to manage with setting up all of the SPF and DKIM rules,” says Fox. “A big fear of ours was that if DMARC was done incorrectly we’d block the spoofed emails — but also block legitimate email and create more pain,” says Martinelli.

After discovering Valimail, it was clear that they had found the solution their team needed. It would enable them to deploy and maintain an email authentication project quickly without the risk associated with trying to build a workable solution themselves. “The solution itself is solid, and Valimail has been there to provide support whenever needed,” says Martinelli. “It finally felt like we had a safe, effective, and efficient way to implement DMARC.”

The solution

Glu deployed Valimail Enforce™, and within 60 days achieved enforcement. Without Valimail’s automated platform in place, DMARC projects usually have less than a 20 percent success rate2 . By contrast, Glu found that even with its complex infrastructure, the implementation process was simple and allowed the team to achieve protection quickly. “It was pretty seamless,” says Fox of the 60-day process. “We immediately improved our visibility and could confidently move to an updated enforcement policy.” While Valimail’s email authentication through DMARC enforcement focuses specifically on maintaining trust for the company’s email domains, it works hand-in-hand with other existing security measures to build a secure, layered ecosystem.

Results

With Valimail, Glu has the certainty of knowing that if bad actors are attempting to send fraudulent emails in their name, they will never reach anyone’s inbox. Employees, customers, and partners can be confident that any email coming from a Glu domain can be trusted. Martinelli says, “With phishing attacks becoming more sophisticated, and email increasing in popularity as an attack vector, it creates a sense of comfort to know that we have mechanisms in place to stop these types of attacks cold.”