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Small Business Cybersecurity: Protect Your Brand
Protecting the reputation and brand of your business is critical to your success. You can help do this by implementing tools that ensure your brand’s name and email addresses don’t get used by others pretending to be you. An email standard known as DMARC is an effective way to stop spammers and phishers from using company “domains” (the part of your email address after the “@”) to carry out dangerous cyber-attacks. It’s a way to verify the sender of an email has permission to use your email domain and send email. DMARC is especially effective in addressing business email compromise (BEC) – a targeted email attack – which is a growing threat to companies. A side benefit to using DMARC protection is that it may lead to better delivery of email to your customers’ inboxes instead of to their spam folder! The tools below can help you set up DMARC and also to understand the information it provides.
Trademark monitoring tools give you visibility into how your business name or brand is being misused, allowing you to take action to protect your reputation. “Look-alike” domains (slightly misspelled or with a different ending, e.g. BestBusiness.com becomes BestBusness.org or BestBusiness.net). Attackers set up similar websites or domains and trick your customers and users to visit or open them to defraud them, resulting in damage to your reputation and brand and harm to your customers.
Use the GCA Cybersecurity Toolkit for Small Business to access tools to assist you in setting up DMARC.
In setting up DMARC, it may be helpful to see who is sending email on your behalf. Once you have set it up, there are tools that can tell you if someone is trying to impersonate you. You also want to protect your brand by protecting your trademarks, so check out the tools in this toolbox.
Since the original post this toolbox has been renamed Protect Your Email and Reputation.
cybercyber securitycybersecurityDMARCGCA Cybersecurity Toolkit for Small BusinessMastercardSmall businesstoolkit
