Electronic mail or email has been around since the early 1970s. Statista estimates that 306.4 billion emails are sent and received daily in 2020.
Is it a wonder then why 96% of phishing attacks arrive by email? Despite this figure, the use of email isn’t expected to go decline any time soon with Statista forecasting over 376.4 billion emails to continue to be sent and received daily by 2025.
What to do?
As organisations across APAC continue to provide remote work options as part of their work arrangements, countries such as Singapore have seen a rise in business email scams – in which hackers make use of an email address seemingly from the organisation to solicit personal data such as identity card numbers and credit card details.
Protecting emails
The Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard is a cross-industry effort to standardise the transmission and use of brand logos in emails, allowing for wider adoption of email authentication while simultaneously providing senders with a way to provide their customers with a more immersive experience.
Google recently announced general support for BIMI in Gmail.
With BIMI, official emails from organisations can be fully authenticated, with recipients using participating email providers like Gmail seeing registered brand logos from BIMI users on their emails.
Entrust is making available its Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs) to support the BIMI standards for strong email sender authentication.
Beyond benefiting security, adopting BIMI with Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) can provide an organisation’s customers with a more immersive experience in Gmail.
By encouraging the deployment of DMARC and promoting its adoption, BIMI benefits the whole email ecosystem to promote strong sender authentication.
How BIMI works
The BIMI standard requires a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) from an authorised Mark Verifying Authority. The VMC works alongside an organisation's Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) protocol policy.
Entrust created the initial concept of the VMC in conjunction with the AuthIndicators working group and issued the first VMC in September 2019.
“Entrust is a proud leader of this new standard for strong email authentication, and to see it gain widespread adoption with the addition of Gmail’s support – and we expect other email providers to add their support for VMCs in the coming months,” said Chris Bailey, vice president of strategy and business development at Entrust.
