The Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) was designed to address situations where email messages that are forwarded, and in some cases altered, will no longer pass email authentication checks. After spending 3 years as a work item in the IETF‘s DMARC Working Group, the specification was published as RFC 8617 (HTML, PDF, plain text) on July […]
Presentation from First JPAAWG Meeting Available
The Japan Anti-Abuse Working Group (JPAAWG) held its first meeting in Tokyo, Japan on November 8th, 2018. DMARC.org director Steve Jones was invited to give a general update on DMARC and related matters, and the slides from that presentation are now available for download. The update covers several areas of interest to people working to […]
DMARC Policies Up 250% In 2018
Over the course of 2018 the number of valid DMARC policies published in the DNS increased a little over two and a half times, based on analysis of data from Farsight Security. At the end of 2017 there were 240,151 DMARC policies published, and at the end of 2018 this figure was roughly 630,000. (The […]
Report Estimates BEC Costs Avoided By DMARC
A report released by the Global Cyber Alliance in late October attempts to quantify the expenses avoided by the companies that they have helped to implement strict DMARC policies (quarantine or reject). The full report (available here) contains a wealth of information and quotes from GCA and industry partners, while the executive summary shares a […]
Version 18 of ARC Specification Published
As first reported on the arc-spec.org website, on October 2nd the IETF’s DMARC Working Group published version 18 of the ARC specification document, incorporating the changes suggested during the Working Group Last Call (WGLC). There are many small language changes to clarify concepts or bring usage in line with other IETF documents, such as Email […]
Working Group Completes Last Call For ARC Specification
The DMARC Working Group has completed Last Call for the ARC specification. This means that when the final consensus changes are incorporated, the document will be submitted for approval and publication by the IETF. It is possible that the specification might be published before the next IETF meeting in November, though perhaps more likely between then […]
DMARC Deployments Quadruple In 2017
Using DNS query data supplied by Farsight Security, global deployment of DMARC appears to have grown by roughly 400% over the course of 2017. The portion of these domains publishing “quarantine” or “reject” policies – which generally prevent fraudulent messages using one of these domains from being delivered to the inbox – rose from 21% […]
OpenARC v0.1.0 has been released
An alpha version of an open source implementation of the ARC protocol has been released. Congratulations to all involved in bringing this project to an initial release. ARC allows forwarders and mailing lists to convey message authentication results that would otherwise be lost, which can present difficulties to some DMARC adopters. OpenARC v0.1.0 can be […]
Number of Domains Actively Using DMARC Triples
The number of Internet domains with active, valid DMARC records as measured at the end of September was over triple the figure from 12 months earlier. Using data supplied by Farsight Security through Q3 2016, the figure was 62,066 domains. Updated with data captured through Q3 2017, that figure rose to 193,958 domains. The following […]
DMARC.org Presents In Japan
On Monday of this week, DMARC.org Executive Director Steven M Jones and a number of prominent colleagues spoke about email authentication and combating online fraud and abuse at Cloud & Messaging Day in Tokyo, Japan. The details of the event, in Japanese, are available at this link. The event featured, in order of appearance: Neil […]