Protect Your Customers From Phishing This Holiday Season And Beyond

Protect Your Customers from Phishing This Holiday Season and Beyond

It’s the most frantic time of the year, isn’t it? From "Place your order for guaranteed delivery!" to "There’s still time!" and "Great last-minute gifts!" — it would certainly seem so by looking at most people’s overflowing personal inboxes.

It’s also, however, the perfect time for bad actors to jump into the fray, impersonate your brand, and scam your customers out of their holiday shopping funds and sensitive personal info.

The Threat is Real

CISA, the FBI, and other government and law enforcement agencies issue annual warnings to consumers about common holiday shopping and charitable donation scams, advising them to be wary of deals that look too good to be true, secure their accounts, and avoid giving out sensitive information over various media. But as you increase your marketing message volume to consumers, so do those bad actors — and they’re taking advantage of generative AI tools to mimic your logo, language, and landing pages more accurately than ever. And if a consumer is taken in by a well-crafted look-alike, they lose trust in your brand regardless.

Protecting Your Customers and Reputation

What can you do to protect your customers and your reputation from human-element breach types like phishing, SMShing, Vshing, and Qshing?

Enforce DMARC across all your sending domains.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), along with DKIM and SPF, prevent attackers and scammers from faking email domains to send malicious, fraudulent emails. Organizations that successfully implement DMARC also prevent unauthorized users from sending email as if they were an authorized sender such as an email marketing service provider.

How:

Collaborate with security colleagues to implement the DMARC protocol and test Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) to help protect your brand, bolster customer trust, and defend against phishing. And be sure that your service providers are monitoring DMARC configurations and status regularly for all your domains.

Get Explicit in Your Security Messages

Your customers should know how you will and how you will not communicate with them. That’s especially important given all the successful social engineering attempts we’ve seen and the trend toward targeted, multipronged campaigns using voice, text, email, and even deepfake audio and video.

How:

Provide them with visuals as to what your confirmation and delivery status emails or texts will include. Security messages from you should precede your high-volume seasons or events and give customers instructions on how to examine the links behind QR codes to verify your official domains. They should offer one phone number they can call to verify communications from you should they have any doubts; also give them a support email address to which they can forward suspicious emails claiming to be from your company or brand. And finally, your communications should let customers know under what circumstances, if any, for which a representative from your company would call them.

Conclusion

The holiday season brings unique opportunities and challenges for businesses. By enforcing DMARC across all your sending domains and getting explicit in your security messages, you can protect your customers and your reputation from phishing and other types of fraud.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is DMARC and how does it help?
A: DMARC is a security protocol that helps prevent email phishing attacks by verifying the authenticity of emails. It helps prevent attackers from sending fraudulent emails by checking the domain name in the email’s header against the one in the domain’s DNS records.

Q: How do I implement DMARC?
A: You can implement DMARC by collaborating with security colleagues to set up the DMARC protocol and testing Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) to help protect your brand and defend against phishing.

Q: What are the benefits of DMARC?
A: The benefits of DMARC include preventing email phishing attacks, preventing unauthorized users from sending email as if they were an authorized sender, and helping to build customer trust.