Securing your domain name for email
Email is everywhere. Once a novelty and something that only geeks would use, to now being a absolute necessity for businesses and individuals. It is an essential form of communication in today's world. However, the massification of email also comes with many security risks. Spam, phishing, spoofing, and malware are ever present and often very difficult to detect.
Protecting your email and your domain is challenging, but, there are some steps you can take to secure your domain for email.
Why do you need to secure your domain for email?
If you own or manage a domain, the most fundamental responsibility is to ensure that it is secure and especially trustworthy. Fail to do so and attackers can use it to send malicious or fraudulent emails that, to the unknowing eye, appear to come from you or your organization. The reputational damage, will harm you, your organization and your customers.
Common attacks
Some of the common attacks that target domains are:
Spam: Unsolicited or unwanted emails that are sent in bulk to many recipients. Spam can be annoying, distracting, or harmful. It can also consume your bandwidth and storage space.
Phishing: Emails that try to trick recipients into clicking on malicious links or attachments, or to provide personal or financial information. Phishing can lead to identity theft, account takeover, or financial loss.
Spoofing: Emails that pretend to come from a legitimate sender by using a forged or similar-looking domain name. Spoofing can be used to impersonate someone else, bypass spam filters, or evade detection.
Malware: Emails that contain malicious software or code that can infect your device or network. Malware can steal your data, damage your system, or perform unwanted actions.
How to secure your domain for email?
If you care about Email Security, and i'm assuming you do because you;re reading this, there are 3 methods that can be used to secure an email domain:
SPF: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a protocol that allows you to specify which servers are authorized to send email from your domain. This helps prevent spoofing and spamming by rejecting emails that do not match your policy.
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a protocol that allows you to sign your emails with a cryptographic key that proves that they originate from your domain. This helps prevent tampering and forgery by verifying the integrity and authenticity of your emails.
DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a protocol that allows you to set policies for how receivers should handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks. This helps prevent phishing and fraud by enforcing your policies and providing feedback on your email performance.
How to implement these methods and tools?
All the methods mentioned above require access to modify your domain (DNS) records.
To create an SPF record, you need to add a TXT record with the value v=spf1 -all. This means that only servers listed in the SPF record are allowed to send email from your domain, and all others are rejected.
DKIM records, can be added as a TXT record or a CNAME record. You also need to configure your email server or service to sign your outgoing emails with the private key
Finally, DMARC record, a TXT record with the value v=DMARC1; followed by various parameters that define your policy3. For example, p=reject means that any email that fails SPF or DKIM checks should be rejected.
To be continued
In the next post, we'll go more into depth on how to create these records and some that can help you monitor your domain.