Video Transcript
Steve: Hi, my name is Steve Cummings. I’m the Vice President of Digital Workplace for Valorem reply.
We're really excited to kick off a new series called 3N3 where we take an interesting topic and we answer 3 questions in 3 minutes or less. We'll cover things like cyber security, communication, collaboration, business process automation, modern device. I'll have a subject matter expert with me, and we'll answer 3 questions: What is it? Why should you care? And what can you do about it? We hope you enjoy it and let's get started.
Alright we're back with 3N3. Thanks for joining us. I've got Charlie Smith here, our resident expert in security, identity, and protection and we're going to talk about DKIM and DMARC today so let's jump right in.
Charlie, what is DKIM and DMARC?
Charlie: Yeah, so any time we're bringing up DKIM and DMARC, we're immediately thinking about security hygiene from an email perspective. This technology is agnostic. It doesn’t' matter what platform you're on. It works on everything. Basically, DMARC is Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. It's a DNS record that works with SPF and DKIM. It basically tells other email servers how to receive your email if it's not properly aligned.
Steve: Excellent. So now that we know a little bit about what it is, why should customers care about what it is?
Charlie: The biggest reasons I help customers implement DKIM and DMARC is to help prevent email spoofing and phishing attempts. Basically, it stops bad actors from spoofing your email address. It’s overall a security hygiene that’s perfect for most customers.
Steve: Excellent. So, a lot of times when we think about spam and phishing, we think about protecting from the end user’s perspective, form the junk mail folder. In this case, it sounds like what it does is it actually protects from sending the messages in the first place so customers can protect their brand identity so that bad actors aren’t sending emails on behalf of them to unsuspecting end users, is that correct?
Charlie: Yes, absolutely.
Steve: So then, what can or what should our customers do about DKIM and DMARC today?
Charlie: Yeah, luckily implementing DKIM and DMARC is fairly simple at the beginning. The first thing you’re going to do is create a DNS record for DMARC and you’re going to set that to monitor mode. So as receiving email servers like the hotmails and gmails of the world receive an email for your domain, it’s going to have a DMARC record set in it saying, hey, give me a report of that. SO they’re going to send a report to that and that’s going to ultimately go to some type of DMARC reporting services and you’ll log into that dashboard to see who is sending as you in the world. At that point, it’ll help identify that you need to either work with your known good senders and get them set up for DKIM signing on emails and for those that are not, it’ll help identify some bad actors that are sending as you. So that’s where everyone should get started.
Steve: Excellent, so it sounds like it’s really simple to get started. It sounds like something that every customer should e doing on their own, but certainly if they need help, they can reach out to us at valoremreply.com. You can fill out a form and get in touch with us. We also produce a lot of blogs and articles on these types of subjects, so thanks again Charlie and check us out at valoremreply.com. Thanks, we'll see you next time.
