Spot Spoofing Risk Before Attackers Abuse Your Brand
Email remains one of the most abused trust channels on the internet. Attackers do not need to compromise your infrastructure to damage your brand, trick your customers, or target your employees. In many cases, they only need to make an email look like it came from you. That is where email domain protection becomes critical.
Your domains are part of your attack surface. If they are not properly protected with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, attackers may be able to spoof your brand, bypass weak authentication controls, and launch phishing campaigns that look disturbingly legitimate. Active Focus helps organizations spot that risk before attackers abuse it.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: The Three Controls That Matter
Email authentication is built around three core mechanisms: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
- SPF defines which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain.
- DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to email, helping receiving mail servers verify that a message was authorized and has not been tampered with.
- DMARC ties SPF and DKIM together and tells receiving mail servers what to do when authentication fails.
When these controls are correctly configured, they significantly reduce the risk of someone impersonating your domain. But “having records” is not the same as being protected. That distinction matters.
A domain can have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in place and still be vulnerable because of weak policies, overly broad sender permissions, broken alignment, missing coverage, or misconfigured third-party services. This is where many organizations get stuck. The DNS records exist, the checkbox is technically ticked, but the actual protection level is unclear.
In Active Focus we help customers understand this data with easy-to-access dashboards. The dashboards are interactive, clickable and provide rich context in terms of remediation. We also provide a dedicated team which helps answer questions and support with remediation.
Dashboards are good, but drill-down is necessary in certain cases. See our video below and get inspiration on how you can secure more and better ownership of email impersonation and DMARC
Why Pentesters Should Care About DMARC
Active Focus is a continuous security platform with a heightened focus on penetration testing, so why would we collect DMARC data? Is it even relevant to penetration testing? Sure enough, it is. Within the DMARC data our platform finds information about the current attack surface. This attack surface is hyper relevant to keep current at all times. A domain sending emails on behalf of your domain? Attack surface!
Attack surface is what River Security is protecting, and because DMARC has information about the attack surface, that is why we collect it.
