Valimail Joins Influential Technology Forum to Drive Collaborative Solutions to Phishing, Spam, and Email Abuse
SAN FRANCISCO, October 30, 2018 — Valimail, the world’s only provider of fully automated email authentication, announced today that the company has been named to the board of the Messaging, Malware, and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG).
Peter Goldstein, co-founder and CTO, and Seth Blank, director of industry initiatives, will jointly represent Valimail on the board for the two-year term.
“We’re extremely proud to join the M3AAWG Board of Directors, an organization that has been incredibly effective at reining in phishing and spam across the email industry,” said Goldstein. “Valimail got its start at a M3AAWG meeting in 2015, where I presented a white paper outlining an innovative approach to email authentication. The feedback for that paper was critical in helping us validate the idea, and the M3AAWG community has been a valuable resource as our company has grown. I’m incredibly pleased that Valimail is able to give back in new ways as a board member.”
M3AAWG (www.m3aawg.org) is where the industry comes together to work against bots, malware, spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online exploitation. Its members represent more than two billion mailboxes from some of the largest network operators worldwide. It leverages the depth and experience of its global membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging services through technology, collaboration and public policy.
Goldstein and Blank have already participated extensively as part of the leadership in the working group. Goldstein was named co-chair of the M3AAWG Technical Committee in July, 2017. In that capacity, he provides oversight and direction on the best practices developed by the committee, and helps oversee the technical work of its Messaging, Malware and Mobile area committees.
Since June, 2018, Blank has served as co-chair of the M3AAWG Collaboration Committee, working with other organization members to find ways to increase cross-industry collaboration on the most pressing threats in mobile and messaging. Blank also serves as chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group, a separate collaborative group developing standards that encourage enterprise adoption and consumer awareness of authentication.
“We appreciate Valimail’s ongoing participation in M3AAWG and in particular Peter’s and Seth’s contributions as co-chairs to the organization, and we are pleased to welcome them onto the M3AAWG board,” said M3AAWG Executive Director Jerry Upton. “As a collaborative industry organization, we are powered by the active participation and support of our members. We are looking forward to working closely with Valimail to advance our shared goal of curtailing Internet abuse.”
These roles, among others, demonstrate Valimail’s commitment to the messaging industry as a whole. Since Valimail’s founding in 2015, it has been an active participant in M3AAWG as well as with several other leading industry organizations, while working collaboratively with ecosystem partners to restore trust to email. Contributing to the organization’s nonpartisan, vendor-neutral mission is an important corporate obligation going hand in hand with Valimail’s open source and standards work, which Blank heads up.
Valimail’s anti-impersonation platform is designed to automate email authentication in order to defeat the #1 vector through which cybercriminals attack organizations today: email phishing/impersonation. Between 90 and 95 percent of all cyberattacks begin with phishing emails (usually categorized as “social engineering”), and the majority of these attacks use impersonation techniques, where the sender fakes or “spoofs” the From address to make it look like it comes from someone the recipient trusts. Valimail’s unique approach to stopping email impersonation is built on an automated, standards-based platform that has been winning awards for its effectiveness and speed of implementation.