Stop Phishing By Using Email Authentication - Business Tips | Federal Trade Commission
Learn how to prevent phishing emails from getting through to your customers. Hear about the FTC’s Staff Perspective on how businesses can protect their brands using email authentication.
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Transcript:
[MUSIC PLAYING] The FTC is announcing the publishing of a new email authentication study on the prevalence of domain authentication tools and DMARC among top online business domains.
This email authentication study is important because we actually have gone out and observed which of the top online businesses and their domains are actually implementing the currently available technical solutions for preventing phishing emails from ever appearing in consumers inboxes.
That's explained in our study. Companies can reduce phishing by implementing some domain authentication tools that are readily available. The internet engineering task force has put out the standards for them. There's SPF which is a sender policy framework. There's DKIM which is the domain keys identified mail.
And there's DMARC which is the way for the sending server to instruct the receiving server on what to do with un-authenticated mail. As well as receive reports about what e-mail has failed authentication.
So the most important thing is that we learned was that SPF as a domain authentication mechanism, is fairly widely distributed. However, we learned DMARC is not widely implemented, regardless of the policy setting. And that very few of those businesses have actually implemented with the strongest setting, which is reject.
To make their system stronger, they can implement SPF and DKIM as methods of domain authentication. And then, they can add to that DMARC which then ties that all together so that the receiving servers can apply a consistent policy. And that any attempts of spoofing can be relayed back to the business.
You can find our email authentication study at ftc.gov.
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