Why Brand Protection?

If your organisation operates under a “brand” name, you need to protect it. Malicious actors stand to gain a lot from abusing or impersonating your brand, including damaging your reputational trust and affecting your relationship with your customers.

Brand protection is business preservation. Effectively protecting your brand online requires a layered approach using software and automation to combat threats relating to impersonation/imitation and logo abuse.

What is online brand abuse?

Traditionally with physical goods, brand protection involved tackling the counterfeiting and abuse of intellectual property by parties operating externally to your business. But attackers increasingly (and efficiently) now use a combination of digital methods of brand abuse including:

  • Fake or ‘Lookalike’ Websites
  • Online Logo/Asset Misuse
  • Business Email Compromise
  • Email Impersonation
  • Scam Campaigns and Phishing Attacks
  • Fake Social Media Accounts
  • Malicious Mobile Apps

Online brand protection strategies to combat these methods include logo and asset detection and management, domain lookalike takedown, DMARC, and BIMI, in conjunction with cyber-security software to detect phishing attacks and warn the end-user.

What is DMARC?

DMARC stands for ‘Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance’ and is an email-authentication protocol designed to protect your domain against impersonation. Having NO DMARC configuration on your domain(s) leaves your organisation particularly vulnerable to email impersonation and domain-based phishing attacks.

Your DMARC status is publicly available information:
>>> check the DMARC, SPF and DKIM settings for your all company domains here

When properly configured in a policy of REJECT, DMARC uses existing protocols SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to ensure that emails sent using your domain are legitimate, preventing hackers from impersonating your brand and damaging your reputation.

DMARC can also improve deliverability rates for marketing/bulk emails by indicating they have come from a reputable source, as the protocol creates a record with metadata about the validation status of each email it receives from each organisation.

DMARC Policies

There are three policy stages of DMARC implementation. Achieving the policy of p=reject is the ultimate aim for your company’s email security, deliverability and brand reputation.

However for your DMARC record to carry on protecting your organisation, it needs regular care and attention, especially as the email sending habits of your domain will change over time.

  • REPORT (p=none) … you are in reporting mode; this policy allows all emails to reach the receiver, regardless of whether or not they have been authorised
  • QUARANTINE (p=quarantine) … emails which fail DMARC validation will be sent to the receiver’s junk/spam folder
  • REJECT (p=reject) … your DMARC is properly configured.

Examples of elements that could potentially affect your DMARC configuration even once you are in ‘p=reject’ include:

  • Email Forwarding – your SPF could break when someone forwards an email
  • Misalignment – your DKIM keys can get out of sync if you use third-party sending services
  • Server Overload – sometimes an ISP may turn off DKIM checks if high processing is required

To provide the necessary visibility with notifications and the tools to put things right again, we highly recommend a monitoring and reporting product like OnDMARC from Red Sift.

To help you understand whether your domains are at risk or not, get in touch with us for a free, no-obligation DNS Intelligence Report using Red Sift’s tool which will:

  • give you a full overview of your DNS configuration
  • identify all email sending sources, both legitimate and illegitimate
  • identify shadow IT
  • display locations of any illegitimate sending sources
  • provide intelligence into any IPs sending emails on behalf of your organisation
  • provide full detail on how to protect your clients against impersonation

Get in touch with us today

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