Businesses unprepared for email authentication rules, warns EasyDMAR
EasyDMARC, the cloud-native email security provider, is warning businesses to prepare for new email authentication rules being introduced by Google and Yahoo, following research highlighting widespread ignorance of the changes.
Announced in February as part of a broader initiative to bolster trust in email communications, the mandate requires ‘bulk senders’ sending at least 5,000 emails in a 24-hour period to implement the DMARC authentication protocol to reduce the risk of phishing and spoofing attacks.
DMARC uses SPF and DKIM to help verify that an email sender is legitimate, automatically rejecting, quarantining or reporting emails that fail checks.
Already, Google and Yahoo are temporarily rejecting non-compliant emails ahead of enforcement ‘no earlier than June 2024’.
In a survey of 1,000 IT decision- makers across the US, UK, Europe and Oceania, only 14%
of survey respondents claim to be ‘very familiar’ with email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, with a further 33% describing themselves as ‘somewhat familiar’.
Three in 10 (30%) have heard of the measures but are not familiar with them, and almost a quarter (23%) are not familiar with them at all.
Just 37% of organisations have installed the DMARC security standard and only 29% of respondents are aware of the changes to email authentication being implemented by Google and Yahoo.
Plans for implementation
When asked about strategies for implementing email authentication, excluding those who had already adopted it or had no plans to implement it, 51% plan to rely on their IT provider or a consultancy to implement the DMARC protocol. An additional 15% plan to use a specialist service to handle the technical aspects of implementation.
This means that two-thirds of businesses, when considering implementation, would outsource it, with only 34% planning to manage and implement the required domain changes internally.
Four out of 10 IT decision-makers cite complexity of implementation as a major barrier to adoption, which might explain why 22% say that not even a decline in email deliverability in the months following the DMARC changes will be enough to persuade their organisation to implement email authentication.
