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...

This is the start of a new ongoing series for us that gives you the tips and tricks you need for successful DMARC deployment. What does "PermError SPF Permanent Error: Too many DNS lookups" mean? There are several safeguards put in place with SPF . One of these is a limitation of DNS lookups to help ensure that you do not have timeout issues. SPF will evaluate only 10 DNS mechanism lookups in an...

One of the great things about a conference like BlackHat is that it gives people like me the opportunity to take a step back, get out of the specific back alleyways of cybersecurity that we usually inhabit, and take a broader, more holistic look at attack and defense. One concept that's been talked about for a while is the Cyber Kill Chain. It takes a military-theoretical approach to network asset...

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...