As if higher education weren’t challenging enough, a recent report by enterprise security company, Proofpoint, found that the top 10 universities in the U.S., UK & Australia are putting their students, faculty & staff at risk of falling victim to email crimes by failing to block attackers from spoofing the schools’ email domains. According to the report, U.S. colleges have the poorest levels of protection, followed by the UK, then Australia. The findings are based on an analysis of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) records at these institutions. DMARC is a decade-old email validation protocol used to authenticate a sender’s domain before delivering an email message to its destination. It can be challenging & costly to implement, but the protocol offers three vital levels of protection; monitor, quarantine & the strongest level, reject. None of the top colleges in any of the countries had the reject level of defense, the report found. Domain spoofing & typosquatting are major threats to learning institutions as they enable bad actors to mimic emails coming from the school. Universities aren’t alone in poor DMARC implementation. A recent global analysis of 64 million domains by Red Sift, a London-based maker of a joint email and brand protection platform, found only 2.1% of domains had implemented DMARC. Also, just 28% of all publicly traded companies in the world have fully implemented it, while 41% enabled only the basic level.
