With email attacks contributing to billions of lost dollars each year, a growing number of organizations are adopting Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) in an effort to protect themselves and their customers from fraudsters.

Social media threats targeting enterprises more than doubled last year. Attacks on the retail industry specifically have grown, as threat actors are targeting victims with impersonation and counterfeit ad campaigns.

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Security blog and has been republished here. 

BIMI is going big time like never before—and brands won't want to get left behind. In a major announcement this week, Internet search giant Google revealed it has joined the AuthIndicators Working Group and committed to a pilot program for BIMI.

In B2B email marketing, nothing says amateur hour like a landing page with the words "Not Secure" in the URL. A missing SSL certificate is bad enough, but it's the lack of something called "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance" (DMARC) that could obliterate your KPIs and cost your company millions in brand reputation and revenue.

Imagine this scenario: you call your high-profile client on your way into the office to check in and see if they’re ready to make the multimillion-dollar down payment on a new property. They tell you they wired it yesterday, following your email instructions. But you never sent them an email.

Now you have to tell your client that that email didn’t come from you. Except that it did—or at least from someone using your email address. And now that someone has your client’s money.

With competition soaring and email-based brand impersonation scams skyrocketing 11x since 2014, your most important digital marketing channel could be in serious danger—along with the revenue it generates. But an email standard called Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) offers a way to fight back.

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.

We all know that phishing attacks came fast and furious. Timed and tailored for maximum effect, these malicious email messages exploit the cruelest of social engineering tactics, preying on customer anxieties, especially in the aftermath of major crises.

Memo to hospitals and healthcare providers: A growing number of phishing scams are targeting consumers—including your customers and patients—through email messages that appear to come from your brand. As these attacks continue to rise in coming months, they could cost consumers—and your brand—plenty.