Blog
Protecting Charities with DMARC
By Jay Singh
Most of us donate money to charity and in turn charities do some truly inspiring and amazing work that benefits the wider community. The vast amount of money that charities receive on a daily basis, combined with the fact they are generally slower to adopt the latest cybersecurity defences, makes them a prime target for cybercriminals. OnDMARC conducted research into the charity sector and analyzed more than 78,000 charity domains in the UK. The results showed that less than 1% of charities in the UK are protected against email impersonation/fraud. This means that 99% of the charities that we donate money to are not taking sufficient measures to make sure the donations they receive and the information they hold is protected against phishing. You can read and download OnDMARC’s full Charity Industry Report here.
A simple way for charities to protect themselves from email impersonation and fraud is by implementing the DMARC protocol on their domains. DMARC is an email security protocol that, when implemented, protects your domain from being used in some of the most advanced phishing attacks. To learn more about DMARC, check out my blog that explains the basics of DMARC, SPF and DKIM.
In the past, implementing DMARC would have been difficult, expensive and time consuming, but with the launch of OnDMARC and other vendors the implementation and maintenance of DMARC has become a very straight forward process. OnDMARC guides users of all abilities to full DMARC protection with simple step-by-step actions to secure their domains.
Following the findings from OnDMARC’s Charity Industry Report we are proud to offer our product to all UK charities for free. We believe the work that charities do for the wider community is essential, and the price of security software as well as the difficulty of implementation has been a barrier to adoption for many charities. We hope that through our Free for Charities program we will be able to encourage higher adoption of the DMARC protocol in the charity industry and ultimately help reduce the amount of successful cyberattacks targeted at this sector.
One of charity success stories is with The Turing Trust. They signed up for our Free for Charities program and successfully blocked over 50 malicious sources from sending on their behalf. They also managed to increase the deliverability of their authorised emails, which had a great impact on their work. You can read the full story of The Turing Trust’s success with OnDMARC here.
If you are a charity who is interested in using the OnDMARC Free for Charities program or you know a charity who would be interested, please visit our charity page on our website for more details.
The author, Jay Singh, is with Marketing and Partnerships at Red Sift, a Global Cyber Alliance partner. You can follow him on Twitter @jaydsingh11.
Editor’s Note: The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the Global Cyber Alliance.
authenticationcybercyber securitycybercrimecybersecurityDKIMDMARCemail authenticationphishingspoofing
