Email spoofing is a common way to launch phishing attacks that can devastate your business. If these attacks occur regularly, they could ruin your company’s reputation.

Cybercriminals steal the identity of a trusted brand, contact, domain, or email to lure and bait individuals into providing personal data like their name, address, phone number, and even their social security number that can be used for financial or identity theft. Often, they send fraudulent links that can be used to scam the subscribers of the email address.

There are no two ways about it, spoofed emails are pretty dangerous. They can steer you to malicious websites developed to steal your personal information or taint your computer with malware employing backdoor Trojans. Sadly, once you’ve been compromised, it’s difficult to determine exactly where the attack stemmed from.

If you receive an email that looks suspicious or has strange links in it, report it to your IT administrator immediately, and do not open any of the links within. If you do, these links may take you to sites designed for cybercrime. Communicating it to your IT administrator guarantees they can take measures to prevent future attacks from happening by updating your company’s email policies and by increasing security for both incoming and outgoing mail.

However, to report it, you have to detect it first, and detecting email spoofs can be difficult, especially when they originate from a source with a valid domain name (amazon.com, PayPal.com, etc.). Nevertheless, there are ways you can discern whether an email originated from another computer or was forged by someone else.

Here are some tips on how to prevent emails spoofing:

1. Authentication protocols 

A clear Illustration, SPF lets a domain owner register which email servers are authorized to send emails from its domain. … So, for domain owners, setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records is an integral step to impede cybercriminals and spammers from sending spoofed emails using their domain name.

2. Use a Dedicated Receive Connector

Exchange servers use Receive connectors to regulate incoming SMTP communication from exterior messaging servers (those out of the organization’s purview), services in the local area, remote exchange servers, or email clients that use SMTP. These connectors are spontaneously generated when the Exchange Mailbox server is set up.

In the default configuration, an Exchange server is set to get emails from anonymous users. This is a susceptibility that allows a malicious employee to take advantage of the system. Unfortunately, you can’t halt emails from anonymous users completely as then you won’t be able to receive valuable emails from external email addresses. So, what you can do is develop another receive connector that uses domain credentials (login ID and password of users and applications) instead of IP addresses to authorize email senders. Although, this insinuates you have to create a domain account for every device and application (web-based printer, for instance) that has to send emails to Exchange. But this issue can be solved by creating one common account for all.

An Exchange server possesses a Receive connector on TCP port 25 which receives external connections, i.e. anonymous emails from SMTP servers. Nevertheless, you can develop another connector for internal SMTP connections on the exact port. The server can choose the suitable connector for each connection on its own.

How to Create a New Receive Connector?

To develop a new Receive connector, use the following PowerShell command:

Current or New Receive Connector Name “Internal Client SMTP” –TransportRole FrontendTransport –Usage Custom –Bindings 0.0.0.0:25 –RemoteIPRanges 192.168.25.0/24 –AuthMechanism TLS, Integrated –PermissionGroups ExchangeUsers

Here, Dedicated Connector SMTP is the name of the new connector and the IP addresses are the spectrum of devices in the IT infrastructure. You can alter the IP addresses as per your infrastructure.

Immediately the new Receive connector is created, you can try sending a spoofed email. Since now you have a security mechanism in place, you will get an error code and the email won’t be sent.

3. Use a Subdomain

Make sure that you aren’t making use of a top-level domain to send out emails (e.g. something that ends with “@zendesk.com”). You should always use a subdomain (“@info.zendesk.com”).

4. Test DKIM

Search for engineers who will help you test and deploy the new DKIM key to make sure it meets DKIM requirements. If it does, that’s it! You can relax a little easier, knowing that it’s much more arduous for people to spoof emails taking advantage of your agency or department’s name.

While putting in DKIM is a technical, multi-step process, it’s an essential part of your email security protocol that can help secure the reputation of your department or agency, as well as the security of citizens’ private information.

5. Add your brand logo to DMARC-authenticated messages (optional)

After you initiate your DMARC, you can alternatively turn on Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). When messages pass DMARC, email clients that support BIMI, including Gmail, show your verified brand logo in the inbox avatar slot.

6. Bottom line

Is your email program secure? What is your DMARC Compliance rating? Over 3 billion domain spoofing emails are sent per day, and it’s your responsibility as an email marketer to make sure you are protecting your brand and your subscribers. Frequently, senders aren’t aware of a spoofing or phishing attack until it’s too late. Enforcing SPF and DKIM is step one; implementing DMARC is step two; receiving, monitoring, and interpreting the reports DMARC provides is step three. These reports are important, as they provide insight into the authentication results sent from your domain, help identify potential domain spoofing, and keep track of authorized third parties sending emails on your behalf.

On the other hand as a subscriber, be vigilant, don’t be in a hurry to make payments through links, and properly read your emails. If you happen to notice anything fishy, alert the real brand via any other communication handle. I believe that they will take the necessary measures that will handle phishing attacks immediately, and no fraudulent email will ever go without being filtered.

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Author: Simon RobertEasyInfoBlog is a multi-author blog. We have experts and professionals in various fields who share their ideas and expert knowledge to help you with your daily information needs. Thanks for reading!