If you haven't deployed Domain-based Messaging Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to protect your brand from being impersonated in phishing scams, there are pressing reasons to jump on it now. Without a doubt, these are extraordinary times for individuals and organizations alike as we've been forced to change the way we work, shop, play, and live seemingly overnight, and for far...

In the first reported case of its kind, a phishing ring in Eastern Europe is exploiting companies' own Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance ( DMARC ) controls to impersonate CEOs in business email compromise (BEC) scams worth millions. As detailed in our new threat actor dossier on a group we call Cosmic Lynx , the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has identified...

Amid a troubling rise in zero-day phishing attacks, recent research suggests that some companies may be making an ill-advised shift away from blocking advanced email threats to responding to them post-delivery. If true, the capitulation couldn't come at a worse time. Since January, cybercriminals taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak have been targeting businesses and individuals with an...

There is no denying that business email compromise (BEC) is big business, with losses exceeding a billion dollars in the United States in the last year alone. Globally, BEC attacks have cost more than $13 billion in the last five years. Chances are likely that you’ve probably been a recipient of one of these social-engineered emails yourself. But the question remains… who is behind these...

You likely have a fraudulent email from a business email compromise (BEC) scammer sitting in your inbox, and you may not realize it. However, recent research from the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has shown that these advanced phishing attacks increasingly possess a handful of commonalities, making them easier to spot—which is good news considering their popularity. There are more BEC...

This post originally appeared on the Armadillo Blog and has been lightly edited for clarity. Most organisations have been successful in blocking malicious emails targeted at their employees, at least to some extent. Various on-premise and cloud providers exist to take care of anti-spam, anti-virus, reputation scores, and advanced features such as sandboxing of executables. As a service provider...

Are you sending Google Calendar invites and not getting replies, or maybe your invitees tell you they tried to reply and it was blocked? Or maybe you are trying reply to Google Calendar invites and being blocked saying the mail is not accepted due to your domain's DMARC policy? This is an issue I have been seeing, so I did some digging and I have figured out what is going on. Before I get to the...

In the last five years, we’ve all become far too familiar with it – hackers spoofing a company’s domain and therefore tarnishing the brand, bad actors attempting to infect our computers with malware, and criminals sending millions of spam messages. As if this isn’t enough, now there is a whole group of people working to outsmart companies AND their customers by using cousin domains to fool...

When you begin to work with DMARC, you realize just how important identifier alignment is. Identifier alignment forces the domains authenticated by SPF and DKIM to have a relationship to the "header From" domain. Header From Domain and the MailFrom domain are different? Yes, they are! Hearing these terms can confuse people. They sound like the same thing, but in reality they are not. The...

This is the second in a new ongoing series for us that gives you the tips and tricks you need for successful DMARC deployment . Read the previous tip here . DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the successor to Yahoo DomainKeys. Both share similarities, however DKIM has the additional aspects of Cisco's Identified Internet Mail standard (IIM). The enhancements to this standard gives more security...

The Benefits of Monitor Mode When a technology exists that can tell you if and when your domains are being spoofed (and by who), why would you not use it?! What is DMARC? DMARC was created to address some fundamental problems with existing email authentication technologies (SPF and DKIM). It provides feedback about your email authentication implementation and gives ISPs (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft...