Common Threats
Email security involves protecting email communications to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It mitigates unauthorized access and prevents identity theft, fraud, and data loss.
Phishing, malware, and credential harvesting are prevalent email threats. Attackers often use impersonation and domain spoofing to deceive victims. QR code phishing and other sophisticated techniques are on the rise, exploiting user trust and security loopholes.
Email Authentication
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) allows email senders to define which IP addresses are allowed to send mail for a specific domain, helping prevent address spoofing.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) helps verify the sender's identity and ensures that the email content has not been tampered with during transit.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) combines SPF and DKIM, providing instructions to email servers on how to handle emails not aligning with these records.
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the standard protocol for sending emails, while senders are the entities or individuals sending the email.
Please note that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are public records. DNS configuration settings are intended to be public in order for your sending servers to send mail and be referenced for authentication by recipient servers. All internet enabled devices perform DNS queries for almost every online action. Tools such as DNS Whale with functions to perform DNS Lookup provide visibility into any DNS records for any Domain
Email Encryption
Various encryption types exist to secure email content, such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), which encrypt the content to ensure that only the intended recipient can read it.
TLS (Transport Layer Security) is essential for securing email in transit. TLS 1.3 is the latest version, providing enhanced security and performance compared to its predecessors.
End-to-end encryption ensures that emails are decrypted only by the sender and intended recipients, preventing intermediaries from reading the contents.
Regulatory Compliance
Emails must comply with various regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, which mandate strict privacy and security measures to protect user data.
ICANN
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) coordinates the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces of the Internet, ensuring network stability and security.