Key Takeaways
- The financial sector recorded the world’s second-largest cyberattack losses in 2023, emphasizing the need for advanced email security.
- DMARC as a service protects financial organizations from phishing, spoofing, and business email compromise.
- Deploying DMARC strengthens regulatory compliance and safeguards client communications.
- Outsourcing DMARC management ensures faster implementation, simplified monitoring, and ongoing threat protection.
- Financial institutions can prevent reputational damage and financial fraud by enforcing DMARC policies at scale.
In 2023, the global financial sector faced the second-highest monetary losses from cyberattacks, highlighting the urgent need for stronger email security. Financial institutions remain top targets for phishing, spoofing, and ransomware campaigns. Implementing DMARC as a service provides banks, credit unions, and investment firms with scalable protection against fraudulent email activity. By securing email channels, financial organizations not only reduce risks but also build stronger trust with clients and regulators.
The financial sector is very attractive to cybercriminals. This is because the hackers’ biggest objective is often monetary gain, and the financial sector is full of money. Scammers impersonate a banking entity, investment firm, or trusted financial advisor to trick victims into providing sensitive information. The consequences of these attacks can be quite serious for both customers and the financial institutions.
When there is no DMARC in place, financial firms are likely to suffer from:
In phishing, hackers manipulate the victims to provide sensitive details like passwords and credit card numbers.
Hackers pose as well-reputed executives to authorize fraudulent transactions.
In domain spoofing, fraudulent emails are sent from a company’s main or unused domains. The aim is to deceive recipients into visiting counterfeit websites.
Many industry requirements and regulations now mandate that financial institutions have the necessary prevention measures in place.
Over a 21-day period between March 3 and March 24, 2016, an attacker used a spoofed email to impersonate a managing member of the Tillage Commodities Fund. The email, sent from a misspelled domain (“@tilllagecapital.com” with three ‘L’s), instructed the fund’s administrator, SS&C Technologies, to process seven wire transfers. Five of the transfers were successful, sending $5.9 million to fraudulent accounts in Hong Kong before the scheme was discovered.
DMARC is an important email authentication protocol. It is designed to prevent hackers from sending emails on your domain’s behalf. DMARC enables domain owners to tell receiving mail servers what to do with emails that do not pass authentication checks. If an email doesn’t meet the criteria, the receiving server can do any of the following:
DMARC can help you achieve:
It’s less likely for an email to be sent to spam or get rejected if it’s from a DMARC-protected domain. This is because both email service providers and recipients trust properly authenticated emails.
DMARC helps prevent unauthorized emails on your domain’s behalf. As recipients trust your emails, they are more likely to view your brand through a positive lens.
Services like PowerDMARC provide detailed reports and 24/7 monitoring of email traffic. This enables you to detect and address threats before they can cause significant damage.
The statistics on financial cybercrime underscore the critical need for immediate action:
From 2019 to 2023, data breaches targeting financial entities increased by 330%.
Almost 70% of financial institutions have been targeted by hackers through domain spoofing. Hackers often impersonate legitimate vendors to scam a business into paying a fake invoice or paying to a fake account. This practice is known as fake invoice fraud and is quite common in financial services.
A staggering 97% of financial service entities saw their clients and partners targeted through the spoofing of their own domains, posing a significant threat to business relationships and reputation.
Setting up DMARC in email security is no longer just a best practice; it’s a compliance requirement. Major email providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo now require bulk senders to configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Furthermore, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v4.0 mandates organizations to train their personnel to detect and report phishing. It also requires to deploy anti-phishing mechanisms to actively detect and stop these attacks.
However, email security doesn’t stop at setting up DMARC. Financial institutions should also:
Educate your staff members on how to recognize and report phishing attempts. Don’t think of this as a one-time training; instead, this should be a continuous learning process, as cyberattacks evolve and it gets harder and harder to spot them.
When you have MFA on all accounts, it adds an extra layer of security. So with MFA in place, it becomes much harder for hackers to gain unauthorized access.
Conduct audits to find vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them. Use tools like an MTA-STS checker to ensure your mail transfer policies are properly configured and your emails are delivered securely.
As banking gets more and more digitized, the financial sector becomes a major target of cyberattacks. The availability of finance-related information makes this field a favorite destination among hackers. While some steps are being taken to protect financial services, there is still a great room for improvement.
Yes, you should keep a DMARC DNS TXT record for publishing an enforcement policy based on SPF and DKIM identifier alignment.
With no DMARC policy published in DNS, receiving MTAs won’t have the necessary instructions. They won’t know how to deal with messages that fail SPF or DKIM alignment. This can facilitate direct domain spoofing.
The main purpose of DMARC is to instruct email receivers on how to deal with unauthenticated mail and prevent email fraud.
Your DMARC settings should ideally start with a monitoring policy (p=none). But ensure to gradually move to a more restrictive policy like p=quarantine or p=reject.
No, DMARC is not explicitly required for PCI compliance, but it is a best practice for email security.
