The Impact of BEC on Organizations
It is a prevalent misperception that cybercriminals target multinational corporations and enterprise-level businesses. Email fraud now affects SMEs just as much as it affects bigger corporations.
Social engineering assaults like phishing, CEO fraud, false invoicing, and email spoofing to mention a few are examples of BEC. It's also known as an impersonation attack, in which an attacker tries to defraud an organization by impersonating persons in positions of authority. The high effectiveness of these assaults is due to impersonating persons such as the CFO or CEO, a business partner, or anyone you would blindly trust.
Post-pandemic, video conferencing programs have become important due to remote working. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the issue by sending bogus emails that appear to be from Zoom, a video conferencing company. This is focused on acquiring login credentials in order to commit big data breaches at an organization.
It is undeniable that the importance of BEC has risen in recent years, with threat actors devising increasingly complex and imaginative ways to get away with fraud. BEC impacts more than 70% of enterprises globally, resulting in annual losses of billions of dollars.
This is why email authentication mechanisms like DMARC are being developed by industry specialists to provide high-level security against impersonation.
Safeguarding your Assets Using Email Authentication
Email authentication is a collection of mechanisms used to offer verifiable information about the source of emails. This is accomplished by verifying the mail transfer agent(s) engaged in the message transfer's domain ownership.
The industry standard for email transport, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), does not include a built-in mechanism for message authentication. As a result, fraudsters may easily conduct email phishing and domain spoofing attacks by abusing the absence of protection. This emphasizes the need for good email authentication methods such as DMARC that really deliver on their promises.
The Role of DMARC in Fighting BEC
Configuring DMARC for your domain is the first step to combating BEC. SPF and DKIM authentication standards are used by Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to authenticate emails received from your domain.
It tells receiving servers how to handle emails that fail one or both of these authentication tests, providing the domain owner complete control over the recipient's response. As a result, in order to implement DMARC, you'll need to:
- Determine all permitted email providers for your domain.
- To configure SPF for your domain, publish an SPF record in your DNS.
- To configure DKIM for your domain, add a DKIM entry to your DNS.
- To configure DMARC for your domain, add a DMARC record to your DNS.
You may configure your DMARC policy to:
- p=none (solely used for monitoring; communications that fail authentication are still transmitted)
- p=quarantine (quarantine level; communications that fail authentication are sent to the spam/junk folder)
- p=reject (DMARC’s strictest setting; communications that fail to authenticate will not be transmitted at all)
We propose that you start utilizing DMARC with a monitoring-only policy so that you can track email flow and delivery difficulties. However, such a strategy would be useless in the face of BEC. This is why you'll need to switch to DMARC enforcement in the future, and EmailAuth can help with this.
With a policy of p=quarantine or p=reject, EmailAuth affords you a smooth transition from monitoring to enforcement in no time, indicating to receiving servers that an email sent from a malicious source using your domain will not be sent to your recipient's inbox at all.
EmailAuth is your one-stop destination for an array of email authentication protocols, including DMARC, SPF, DKIM, BIMI. Sign up today to avail a free DMARC checker.
Original source: https://www.reddit.com/user/emailauth-io/comments/t4yckx/fight_bec_using_email_authentication/
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