Email Fraud Landscape, Q2 2018

The crisis of fake email continues. Far from being merely a “social engineering” issue, fake email is a direct result of technical issues with the way email is implemented: It lacks a built-in authentication mechanism making it all too easy to spoof senders. However, this problem is also amenable to a technical solution, starting with the email authentication standards DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.

Valimail used proprietary data from our analysis of billions of email message authentication requests, plus our analysis of more than 3 million publicly accessible DMARC and SPF records, to compile a unique view of the email fraud landscape. Now in its third consecutive quarter, our report shows how the fight against fake email is progressing worldwide, in a variety of industry categories.

Key findings

• 6.4 billion fake emails (with fake From: addresses) are sent worldwide every day
• The United States continues to lead the world as a source of fake email
• The rate of DMARC implementation continues to grow in every industry
• DMARC enforcement remains a major challenge, with a failure rate of 75-80 percent in every industry