How to get a High Security Rating for Your Domain with Email Authentication Power Analyzer?
A step-by-step guide on getting a higher domain rating with PowerAnalyzer
What is PowerAnalyzer?
PowerAnalyzer is our free domain analyzer tool that gives you a comprehensive analysis of the different records you have published for your domain and provides you a rating based on how strong your domain’s email security is. PowerAnalyzer helps you find errors in your DNS records in great detail, so that you can mitigate them and get a higher score on your domain’s overall performance and security rating.
Getting a Higher Rating with PowerAnalyzer: What Does It Signify?
A domain that has all necessary authentication protocols implemented correctly and enforced is one that is secure from email spoofing attacks, BEC, and pervasive monitoring attacks like man-in-the-middle, and has a very strong email security infrastructure. Such a domain will most likely have an above 80% rating on PowerAnalyzer. Therefore, such a rating is a reason for celebration for you as the domain owner. Let’s look at how that can be made possible with our step-by-step guide.
Steps to Get a Higher Security Rating for Your Domain
1. Implement Authentication Protocols
The first step towards achieving a higher rating is implementing authentication protocols to authorize your senders and authenticate your outbound email messages. For this you need to configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain.
Correctly configuring authentication protocols will automatically boost your rating.
2. Shift to a Policy of Maximum Enforcement
A DMARC policy of none is good for when you are just starting off with email authentication and you want to monitor your email flow. But, with a none policy you can’t protect your domain from email spoofing attacks and brand abuse. This is why in order to boost your domain security it is ideal that you shift to a DMARC policy of p=reject.
With a reject policy, as soon as outgoing messages reaching your receivers’ inboxes fail authentication checks they would not be delivered at all. Therefore a spoofer trying to impersonate your brand will no longer be able to succeed in his intentions. This is why protocol policies at enforcement automatically strengthens your domain’s security even further, providing you a higher rating on the analyzer.
3. Gain Visibility with Authentication Reports
Publishing your DMARC record without enforcing it is not good enough. To correctly enforce your domain, it is crucial to monitor your authentication results. Monitoring your DMARC authentication results helps you gain complete visibility into your email ecosystem and detect issues in email delivery and protocol configurations. DMARC reports are of 2 types:
- DMARC aggregate (RUA) reports
- DMARC forensic (RUF) reports
DMARC aggregate reports are available in 7 different formats on the PowerDMARC dashboard so that you can sort them by organization, sending source, host, statistics, geolocation and country. We simplify your data in the form of charts and tables for ease of use and at a glance analysis.
DMARC forensic reports give you more crucial and in-depth details about your authentication results. We also allow you to encrypt them with a key that only you have access to, providing you with maximum privacy.
4. Steer Clear of Common SPF Errors
Another factor that can land you a lower rating than expected is exceeding 10 DNS lookups for SPF. This invalidates your SPF record and affects email deliverability. To stay under the lookup limit what you need is PowerSPF– your dynamic SPF that pulls through nested IP addresses to generate a record with a single include statement. It provides:
5. Make Your Brand Visually Identifiable in Your Recipients’ Inboxes
After an email has landed into your receivers’ inboxes it is now up to them whether they will view or not, you have no control over that. This is why making your brand visually identifiable in your receivers’ inboxes is imperative. This will not only enhance your brand recall and credibility, it will also help your end customers mark your emails as legitimate and increase the chances of them opening your emails and going through your messages. This is exactly what Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) does.
PowerDMARC makes BIMI implementation a cakewalk with an easy 3 step configuration procedure.
6. Protect Your Emails in Transit
While so far we have been trying to authenticate messages that have already reached your receiver’s mail servers, what about when attackers try to eavesdrop on email content while the messages addressed to your domain are still in transit? This is the classic example of an MITM attack wherein a cybercriminal deploys an SMTP downgrade attack to roll back an SMTP communication to cleartext and decrypt email messages so that they become easily accessible. Opting for protection against it will give you a higher rating as it depicts that your emails are safe and encrypted even in transit. To do so:
Sign up today with PowerDMARC to boost email security and deliverability and keep impersonation attacks at bay!
