Will This Group Hit “De Mark” to Stop Phishing?

Will This Group Hit “De Mark” to Stop Phishing?

You know the saying one bad apple spoils the bunch? It’s true for apples. And it’s true for email marketing too. Anything that makes consumers suspicious of email is bad for all of us, no matter how rigidly we adhere to email marketing best practices or how squeaky clean our sending reputation. Phishing is one of those bad apples.

When the bad guys are phishing, they are trying to get user names, passwords, account numbers and other secure information by pretending to be a legitimate business.

One group is taking on phishing using existing technology: DMARC. DMARC won’t stop the bad guys from trying to get consumers’ personal information by some other means, but it will stop them from being able to masquerade as a legitimate business such as banks by using that bank’s domain name.

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. It’s a technical specification created by a group of organizations that:

“…standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using the well-known SPF and DKIM mechanisms. This means that senders will experience consistent authentication results for their messages at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and any other email receiver implementing DMARC. We hope this will encourage senders to more broadly authenticate their outbound email which can make email a more reliable way to communicate.”

In short, DMARC gives your company control over its domain. That won’t stop someone from phishing using a similar domain name to yours, or some other underhanded way, but they won’t be able to use yours. And that will eliminate at least a few rotting apples from the bunch, we hope.

Learn more about how DMARC fights phishing at http://www.dmarc.org.