Flattening SPF records: Why is it worth the effort?

Flattening SPF records: Why is it worth the effort?

Maintaining an SPF record is pretty easy, given that you use only one or two email services. But that’s not always the case. For most organizations, there are more than a handful of servers and third-party services that are used to send emails to their clients and prospects. These services include CRM platforms, marketing tools,…

SPF and multi-tenant email service providers: a collision course?

SPF and multi-tenant email service providers: a collision course?

During the 2024 Black Friday to Cyber Monday (BFCM) period, Mailchimp customers sent billions of emails. Notably, on Black Friday alone, over 133 million emails were dispatched in a single hour. On the other hand, SendGrid claims to send 148+ billion emails every month. And at the same time, there has been a massive 202%…

SPF DNS lookup limits: exploits, mitigations, and best practices

SPF DNS lookup limits: exploits, mitigations, and best practices

SPF (Sender Policy Framework), one of the three email authentication protocols, enables recipient email servers to verify whether or not the email received is an authorized one. However, SPF comes with its own set of intricacies, as there is a limit of 10 DNS lookups. Once the SPF record has reached the maximum limit of…

Shadow admins: How do you uncover the mask of these stealthy accounts?

Most organizations have strict norms and regulations on what resources their employees can access— like which systems are open to all, who gets special permissions like admin rights, or which tools are absolutely out of bounds. While most employees abide by these rules, there are some who find a way to work around them.  This…

Understanding the Trello Breach: Security Concerns and Expert Response

The Trello breach, which occurred in January 2024, resulted in approximately 15 million users having their email addresses, names, usernames, project management information, and activity logs scraped and offered for sale on a hacking forum. This incident raised significant concerns regarding user data security and highlighted the importance of implementing strong passwords and two-factor authentication…

The right way to transition to SPF HardFail (-all)

Sender Policy Framework, or SPF, is a simple way to tell the receiving servers which IPs or mail servers are allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain. It basically means ‘allowlisting’ all those who are officially permitted to send emails as your business representatives. But that’s not all when it comes to implementing…

Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail warn users ahead of anticipated AI menaces in 2025

Gone are the days when incorrect grammar, poor graphics, an unprofessional tone, and other flaws were red flags of a phishing email. It’s 2025, and AI has enabled threat actors to create convincing emails without such flaws. They are creating sophisticated emails that look like they have been genuinely sent by friends, colleagues, clients, service…

Cyber resilience 2025- a bigger picture of technical agility and adaption for businesses

In general, cyber resilience is a company’s ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks or IT failures while continuing to operate smoothly. It’s like having a backup plan and strong defenses to keep business running even when something goes wrong. There is no strict definition of cyber resilience as the digital landscape keeps…

SPF record +all mechanism- why is it the most dangerous SPF setting

SPF prevents emails sent by unauthorized people from landing in the inboxes of targeted recipients. However, if your SPF record is misconfigured, it can do more harm than good- especially if it’s overly permissive. By overly permissive, we mean using the +all mechanism, as this setting can turn your domain into an open relay for…

The point where DORA and DMARC intersect

DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) is a Europe-based framework explicitly designed to establish regulatory compliance for the finance sector. This act has been in force since January 2025. Though DORA and DMARC are not directly linked with each other, DMARC helps in DORA compliance by improving the email security posture.  DMARC is an email authentication…