Tag Archives: email security

A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you

Post Syndicated from Pete Pang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-wild-week-in-phishing-and-what-it-means-for-you


Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.

You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.

Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three main attack vectors that Cloudflare has seen most impactful from the bad emails we protect our customers from: 1. Clicking links (deceptive links are 35.6% of threat indicators) 2. Downloading files or malware  (malicious attachments are 1.9% of threat indicators) 3. Business email compromise (BEC) phishing that elicits money or intellectual property with no links or files (0.5% of threat indicators).

Today, we at Cloudflare see an increase in what we’ve termed multi-channel phishing. What other channels are there to send links, files and elicit BEC actions? There’s SMS (text messaging) and public and private messaging applications, which are increasingly common attack vectors that take advantage of the ability to send links over those channels, and also how people consume information and work. There’s cloud collaboration, where attackers rely on links, files, and BEC phishing on commonly used collaboration tools like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Microsoft Office 365. And finally, there’s web and social phishing targeting people on LinkedIn and X. Ultimately, any attempt to stop phishing needs to be comprehensive enough to detect and protect against these different vectors.

Learn more about these technologies and products here

A real example

It’s one thing to tell you this, but we’d love to give you an example of how a multi-channel phish plays out with a sophisticated attacker.

Here’s an email message that an executive notices is in their junk folder. That’s because our Email Security product noticed there’s something off about it and moved it there, but it relates to a project the executive is working on, so the executive thinks it’s legitimate. There’s a request for a company org chart, and the attacker knows that this is the kind of thing that’s going to be caught if they continue on email, so they include a link to a real Google form:

  • The executive clicks the link, and because it is a legitimate Google form, it displays the following:
  • There’s a request to upload the org chart here, and that’s what they try to do:
  • The executive drags it in, but it doesn’t finish uploading because in the document there is an “internal only” watermark that our Gateway and digital loss prevention (DLP) engine detected, which in turn prevented the upload.
  • Sophisticated attackers use urgency to drive better outcomes. Here, the attackers know the executive has an upcoming deadline for the consultant to report back to the CEO. Unable to upload the document, they respond back to the attacker. The attacker suggests that they try another method of upload or, in the worst case scenario, send the document on WhatsApp.
  • The executive attempts to upload the org chart to the website they were provided in the second email, not knowing that this site would have loaded malware, but because it was loaded in Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation, it kept the executive’s device safe. Most importantly, when trying to upload sensitive company documents, the action is stopped again:
  • Finally they try WhatsApp, and again, we block it:

Ease of use

Setting up a security solution and maintaining it is critical to long term protection. However, having IT administration teams constantly tweak each product, configuration, and monitor each users’ needs is not only costly but risky as well, as it puts a large amount of overhead on these teams.

Protecting the executive in the example above required just four steps:

  1. Install and login to Cloudflare’s device agent for protection

With just a few clicks, anyone with the device agent client can be protected against multi-channel phish, making it easy for end users and administrators. For organizations that don’t allow clients to be installed, an agentless deployment is also available.  

2.  Configure policies that apply to all your user traffic routed through our secure web gateway. These policies can block access outright to high risk sites, such as those known to participate in phishing campaigns. For sites that may be suspicious, such as newly registered domains, isolated browser access allows users to access the website, but limits their interaction.

The executive was also unable to upload the org chart to a free cloud storage service because their organization is using Cloudflare One’s Gateway and Browser Isolation solutions that were configured to load any free cloud storage websites in a remote isolated environment, which not only prevented the upload but also removed the ability to copy and paste information as well.

Also, while the executive was able to converse with the bad actor over WhatsApp, their files were blocked because of Cloudflare One’s Gateway solution, configured by the administrator to block all uploads and downloads on WhatsApp.

3.  Set up DLP policies based on what shouldn’t be uploaded, typed, or copied and pasted.

The executive was unable to upload the org chart to the Google form because the organization is using Cloudflare One’s Gateway and DLP solutions. This protection is implemented by configuring Gateway to block any DLP infraction, even on a valid website like Google.

4.  Deploy Email Security and set up auto-move rules based on the types of emails detected.

In the example above, the executive never received any of the multiple malicious emails that were sent to them because Cloudflare’s Email Security was protecting their inbox. The phishing emails that did arrive were put into their Junk folder because the email was impersonating someone that didn’t match the signature in the email, and the configuration in Email Security automatically moved it there because of a one-click configuration set by the executive’s IT administrator.

But even with best-in-class detections, it goes without saying that it is important to have the ability to drill down on any metric to learn about individual users that are being impacted by an ongoing attack. Below is a mockup of our upcoming improved email security monitoring dashboard.

What’s next

While phishing, despite being around for three decades, continues to be a clear and present danger, effective detections in a seamless and comprehensive solution are really the only way to stay protected these days.

If you’re simply thinking about purchasing email security by itself, you can see why that just isn’t enough. Multi-layered protection is absolutely necessary to protect modern workforces, because work and data don’t just sit in email. They’re everywhere and on every device. Your phishing protection needs to be as well.

While you can do this by stitching together multiple vendors, it just won’t all work together. And besides the cost, a multi-vendor approach also usually increases overhead for investigation, maintenance, and uniformity for IT teams that are already stretched thin.

Whether or not you are at the start of your journey with Cloudflare, you can see how getting different parts of the Cloudflare One product suite can help holistically with phishing. And if you are already deep in your journey with Cloudflare, and are looking for 99.99% effective email detections trusted by the Fortune 500, global organizations, and even government entities, you can see how our Email Security helps.

If you’re running Office 365, and you’d like to see what we can catch that your current provider cannot, you can start right now with Retro Scan.

And if you are using our Email Security solution already, you can learn more about our comprehensive protection here.

How Cloudflare Cloud Email Security protects against the evolving threat of QR phishing

Post Syndicated from Pete Pang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-cloud-email-security-protects-against-the-evolving-threat-of-qr-phishing


In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, a subtle yet potent form of phishing has emerged — quishing, short for QR phishing. It has been 30 years since the invention of QR codes, yet quishing still poses a significant risk, especially after the era of COVID, when QR codes became the norm to check statuses, register for events, and even order food.

Since 2020, Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution (previously known as Area 1) has been at the forefront of fighting against quishing attacks, taking a proactive stance in dissecting them to better protect our customers. Let’s delve into the mechanisms behind QR phishing, explore why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers, and review how Cloudflare contributes to the fight against this evolving threat.

How quishing works

The impact of phishing and quishing are quite similar, as both can result in users having their credentials compromised, devices compromised, or even financial loss. They also leverage malicious attachments or websites to provide bad actors the ability to access something they normally wouldn’t be able to. Where they differ is that quishing is typically highly targeted and uses a QR code to further obfuscate itself from detection.

Since phish detection engines require inputs like URLs or attachments inside an email in order to detect, quish succeeds by hampering the detection of these inputs. In Example A below, the phish’s URL was crawled and after two redirects landed on a malicious website that automatically tries to run key logging malware that copies login names and passwords. For Example A, this clearly sets off the detectors, but Example B has no link to crawl and therefore the same detections that worked on Example A are rendered inert.

Strange you say, if my phone can scan that QR code then can’t a detection engine recognize the QR code as well? Simply put, no, because phish detection engines are optimized for catching phish, but to identify and scan QR codes requires a completely different engine – a computer vision engine. This brings us to why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers.

Why QR codes for phishing?

There are three main reasons QR codes are popular in phishing attacks. First, QR codes boast strong error correction capabilities, allowing them to withstand resizing, pixel shifting, variations in lighting, partial cropping, and other distortions. Indeed, computer vision models can scan QR codes, but identifying which section of an email, image, or webpage linked in an email has a QR code is quite difficult for a machine, and even more so if the QR codes have been obfuscated to hide themselves from some computer vision models. For example, by inverting them, blending them with other colors or images, or making them extremely small, computer vision models will have trouble even identifying the presence of QR codes, much less even being able to scan them. Though filters and additional processing can be applied to any image, not knowing what or where to apply makes the deobfuscation of a QR code an extremely expensive computational problem. This not only makes catching all quish hard, but is likely to cause frustration for an end user who won’t get their emails quickly because an image or blob of text looks similar to a QR code, resulting in delivery delays.

Even though computer vision models may have difficulty deobfuscating QR codes, we have discovered from experience that when a human encounters these obfuscated QR codes, with enough time and effort, they are usually able to scan the QR code. By doing everything from increasing the brightness of their screen, to printing out the email, to resizing the codes themselves, they can make a QR code that has been hidden from machines scan successfully.

Don’t believe us? Try it for yourself with the QR codes that have been obfuscated for machines. They all link to https://blog.cloudflare.com/

(Brick wall image by rawpixel.com on Freepik)

If you scanned any of the example QR codes above, you have just proven the next reason bad actors favor quish. The devices used for accessing QR codes are typically personal devices with a limited security posture, making them susceptible to exploitation. While secured corporate devices typically have measures to warn, stop, or sandbox users when they access malicious links, these protections are not available natively on personal devices. This can be especially worrisome, as we have seen a trend towards custom QR codes targeting executives in organizations.

QR codes can also be seamlessly layered in with other obfuscation techniques, such as encrypted attachments, mirrors that mimic well-known websites, validations to prove you are human before malicious content is revealed, and more. This versatility makes them an attractive choice for cybercriminals seeking innovative ways to deceive unsuspecting users by adding QR codes to previously successful phishing vectors that have now been blocked by security products.

Cloudflare’s protection strategy

Cloudflare has been at the forefront of defending against quishing attacks. We employ a multi-faceted approach, and instead of focusing on archaic, layered email configuration rules, we have trained our machine learning (ML) detection models on almost a decade’s worth of detection data and have a swath of proactive computer vision models to ensure all of our customers start with a turnkey solution.

For quish detections, we break it into two parts: 1) identification and scanning of QR codes 2) analysis of decoded QR codes.

The first part is solved by our own QR code detection heuristics that inform how, when, and where for our computer vision models to execute. We then leverage the newest libraries and tools to help identify, process, and most importantly decode QR codes. While it is relatively easy for a human to identify a QR code, there is almost no limit to how many ways they can be obfuscated to machines. The examples we provided above are just a small sample of what we’ve seen in the wild, and bad actors are constantly discovering new methods to make QR codes hard to quickly find and identify, making it a constant cat and mouse game that requires us to regularly update our tools for the trending obfuscation technique.

The second part, analysis of decoded QR codes, goes through all the same treatment we apply to phish and then some. We have engines that deconstruct complex URLs and drill down to the final URL, from redirect to redirect, whether they are automatic or not. Along the way, we scan for malicious attachments and malicious websites and log findings for future detections to cross-reference. If we encounter any files or content that are encrypted or password protected, we leverage another group of engines that attempt to decrypt and unprotect them, so we can identify if there was any obfuscated malicious content. Most importantly, with all of this information, we continuously update our databases with this new data, including the obfuscation of the QR code, to make better assessments of similar attacks that leverage the methods we have documented.

However, even with a well-trained suite of phish detection tools, quite often the malicious content is at the end of a long chain of redirects that prevent automated web crawlers from identifying anything at all, much less malicious content. In between redirects, there might be a hard block that requires human validation, such as a CAPTCHA, which makes it virtually impossible for an automated process to crawl past, and therefore unable to classify any content at all. Or there might be a conditional block with campaign identification requirements, so if anyone is outside the original target’s region or has a web browser and operating system version that doesn’t meet the campaign requirements, they would simply view a benign website, while the target would be exposed to the malicious content. Over the years, we have built tools to identify and pass these validations, so we can determine malicious content that may be there.

However, even with all the technologies we’ve built over the years, there are cases where we aren’t able to easily get to the final content. In those cases, our link reputation machine learning models, which have been trained on multiple years of scanned links and their metadata, have proven to be quite valuable and are easily applied after QR codes are decoded as well. By correlating things like domain metadata, URL structure, URL query strings, and our own historical data sets, we are able to make inferences to protect our customers. We also take a proactive approach and leverage our ML models to tell us where to hunt for QR codes, even if they aren’t immediately obvious, and by scrutinizing domains, sentiment, context, IP addresses, historical use, and social patterns between senders and recipients, Cloudflare identifies and neutralizes potential threats before they can inflict harm.

Creative examples and real world instances

With the thousands of QR codes we process daily, we see some interesting trends. Notable companies, including Microsoft and DocuSign, have frequently been the subjects of impersonation for quishing attacks. What makes this more confusing for users, and even more likely to scan them, is that these companies actually use QR codes in their legitimate workflows. This further underscores the urgency for organizations to fortify their defenses against this evolving threat.

Below are three examples of the most interesting quish we have found and compared against the real use cases by the respective companies. The QR codes used in these emails have been masked.

Microsoft Authenticator

Microsoft uses QR codes as a faster way to complete MFA instead of sending six digit SMS codes to users’ phones that can be delayed and are also considered safer, as SMS MFA can be intercepted through SIM swap attacks. Users would have independently registered their devices and would have previously seen the registration screen on the right, so receiving an email that says they need to re-authenticate doesn’t seem especially odd.

DocuSign

DocuSign uses QR codes to make it easier for users to download their mobile app tosign documents, identity verification via a mobile device to take photos, and supports embedding DocuSign features in third party apps which have their own QR code scanning functionality. The use of QR codes in native DocuSign apps and non-native apps makes it confusing for frequent DocuSign users and not at all peculiar for users that rarely use DocuSign. While the QR code for downloading the DocuSign app is not used in signature requests, to a frequent user, it might just seem like a fast method to open the request in the app they already have downloaded on their mobile device.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft uses QR codes for Teams to allow users to quickly join a team via a mobile device, and while Teams doesn’t use QR codes for voicemails, it does have a voicemail feature. The email on the left seems like a reminder to check voicemail in Teams and combines the two real use cases on the right.

How you can help prevent quishing

As we confront the persistent threat of quishing, it’s crucial for individuals and organizations to be vigilant.  While no solution can guarantee 100% protection, collective diligence can significantly reduce the risk, and we encourage collaboration in the fight against quishing.

If you are already a Cloud Email Security customer, we remind you to submit instances of quish from within our portal to help stop current threats and enhance the capabilities of future machine learning models, leading to more proactive defense strategies. If you aren’t a customer, you can still submit original quish samples as an attachment in EML format to [email protected], and remember to leverage your email security provider’s submission process to inform them of these quishing vectors as well.

The battle against quishing is ongoing, requiring continuous innovation and collaboration. To support submissions of quish, we are developing new methods for customers to provide targeted feedback to our models and also adding additional transparency to our metrics to facilitate tracking a variety of vectors, including quish.

Security Week 2024 wrap up

Post Syndicated from Daniele Molteni original https://blog.cloudflare.com/security-week-2024-wrap-up


The next 12 months have the potential to reshape the global political landscape with elections occurring in more than 80 nations, in 2024, while new technologies, such as AI, capture our imagination and pose new security challenges.

Against this backdrop, the role of CISOs has never been more important. Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare’s Chief Security Officer, shared his views on what the biggest challenges currently facing the security industry are in the Security Week opening blog.

Over the past week, we announced a number of new products and features that align with what we believe are the most crucial challenges for CISOs around the globe. We released features that span Cloudflare’s product portfolio, ranging from application security to securing employees and cloud infrastructure. We have also published a few stories on how we take a Customer Zero approach to using Cloudflare services to manage security at Cloudflare.

We hope you find these stories interesting and are excited by the new Cloudflare products. In case you missed any of these announcements, here is a recap of Security Week:

Responding to opportunity and risk from AI

Title Excerpt
Cloudflare announces Firewall for AI Cloudflare announced the development of Firewall for AI, a protection layer that can be deployed in front of Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify abuses and attacks.
Defensive AI: Cloudflare’s framework for defending against next-gen threats Defensive AI is the framework Cloudflare uses when integrating intelligent systems into its solutions. Cloudflare’s AI models look at customer traffic patterns, providing that organization with a tailored defense strategy unique to their environment.
Cloudflare launches AI Assistant for Security Analytics We released a natural language assistant as part of Security Analytics. Now it is easier than ever to get powerful insights about your applications by exploring log and security events using the new natural language query interface.
Dispelling the Generative AI fear: how Cloudflare secures inboxes against AI-enhanced phishing Generative AI is being used by malicious actors to make phishing attacks much more convincing. Learn how Cloudflare’s email security systems are able to see past the deception using advanced machine learning models.

Maintaining visibility and control as applications and clouds change

Title Excerpt
Magic Cloud Networking simplifies security, connectivity, and management of public clouds Introducing Magic Cloud Networking, a new set of capabilities to visualize and automate cloud networks to give our customers easy, secure, and seamless connection to public cloud environments.
Secure your unprotected assets with Security Center: quick view for CISOs Security Center now includes new tools to address a common challenge: ensuring comprehensive deployment of Cloudflare products across your infrastructure. Gain precise insights into where and how to optimize your security posture.
Announcing two highly requested DLP enhancements: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Source Code Detections Cloudflare One now supports Optical Character Recognition and detects source code as part of its Data Loss Prevention service. These two features make it easier for organizations to protect their sensitive data and reduce the risks of breaches.
Introducing behavior-based user risk scoring in Cloudflare One We are introducing user risk scoring as part of Cloudflare One, a new set of capabilities to detect risk based on user behavior, so that you can improve security posture across your organization.
Eliminate VPN vulnerabilities with Cloudflare One The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency issued an Emergency Directive due to the Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure vulnerabilities. In this post, we discuss the threat actor tactics exploiting these vulnerabilities and how Cloudflare One can mitigate these risks.
Zero Trust WARP: tunneling with a MASQUE This blog discusses the introduction of MASQUE to Zero Trust WARP and how Cloudflare One customers will benefit from this modern protocol.
Collect all your cookies in one jar with Page Shield Cookie Monitor Protecting online privacy starts with knowing what cookies are used by your websites. Our client-side security solution, Page Shield, extends transparent monitoring to HTTP cookies.
Protocol detection with Cloudflare Gateway Cloudflare Secure Web Gateway now supports the detection, logging, and filtering of network protocols using packet payloads without the need for inspection.
Introducing Requests for Information (RFIs) and Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) for threat intelligence teams Our Security Center now houses Requests for Information and Priority Intelligence Requirements. These features are available via API as well and Cloudforce One customers can start leveraging them today for enhanced security analysis.

Consolidating to drive down costs

Title Excerpt
Log Explorer: monitor security events without third-party storage With the combined power of Security Analytics and Log Explorer, security teams can analyze, investigate, and monitor logs natively within Cloudflare, reducing time to resolution and overall cost of ownership by eliminating the need of third-party logging systems.
Simpler migration from Netskope and Zscaler to Cloudflare: introducing Deskope and a Descaler partner update Cloudflare expands the Descaler program to Authorized Service Delivery Partners (ASDPs). Cloudflare is also launching Deskope, a new set of tooling to help migrate existing Netskope customers to Cloudflare One.
Protecting APIs with JWT Validation Cloudflare customers can now protect their APIs from broken authentication attacks by validating incoming JSON Web Tokens with API Gateway.
Simplifying how enterprises connect to Cloudflare with Express Cloudflare Network Interconnect Express Cloudflare Network Interconnect makes it fast and easy to connect your network to Cloudflare. Customers can now order Express CNIs directly from the Cloudflare dashboard.
Cloudflare treats SASE anxiety for VeloCloud customers The turbulence in the SASE market is driving many customers to seek help. We’re doing our part to help VeloCloud customers who are caught in the crosshairs of shifting strategies.
Free network flow monitoring for all enterprise customers Announcing a free version of Cloudflare’s network flow monitoring product, Magic Network Monitoring. Now available to all Enterprise customers.
Building secure websites: a guide to Cloudflare Pages and Turnstile Plugin Learn how to use Cloudflare Pages and Turnstile to deploy your website quickly and easily while protecting it from bots, without compromising user experience.
General availability for WAF Content Scanning for file malware protection Announcing the General Availability of WAF Content Scanning, protecting your web applications and APIs from malware by scanning files in-transit.

How can we help make the Internet better?

Title Excerpt
Cloudflare protects global democracy against threats from emerging technology during the 2024 voting season At Cloudflare, we’re actively supporting a range of players in the election space by providing security, performance, and reliability tools to help facilitate the democratic process.
Navigating the maze of Magecart: a cautionary tale of a Magecart impacted website Learn how a sophisticated Magecart attack was behind a campaign against e-commerce websites. This incident underscores the critical need for a strong client side security posture.
Cloudflare’s URL Scanner, new features, and the story of how we built it Discover the enhanced URL Scanner API, now integrated with the Security Center Investigate Portal. Enjoy unlisted scans, multi-device screenshots, and seamless integration with the Cloudflare ecosystem.
Changing the industry with CISA’s Secure by Design principles Security considerations should be an integral part of software’s design, not an afterthought. Explore how Cloudflare adheres to Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s Secure by Design principles to shift the industry.
The state of the post-quantum Internet Nearly two percent of all TLS 1.3 connections established with Cloudflare are secured with post-quantum cryptography. In this blog post we discuss where we are now in early 2024, what to expect for the coming years, and what you can do today.
Advanced DNS Protection: mitigating sophisticated DNS DDoS attacks Introducing the Advanced DNS Protection system, a robust defense mechanism designed to protect against the most sophisticated DNS-based DDoS attacks.

Sharing the Cloudflare way

Title Excerpt
Linux kernel security tunables everyone should consider adopting This post illustrates some of the Linux kernel features that are helping Cloudflare keep its production systems more secure. We do a deep dive into how they work and why you should consider enabling them.
Securing Cloudflare with Cloudflare: a Zero Trust journey A deep dive into how we have deployed Zero Trust at Cloudflare while maintaining user privacy.
Network performance update: Security Week 2024 Cloudflare is the fastest provider for 95th percentile connection time in 44% of networks around the world. We dig into the data and talk about how we do it.
Harnessing chaos in Cloudflare offices This blog discusses the new sources of “chaos” that have been added to LavaRand and how you can make use of that harnessed chaos in your next application.
Launching email security insights on Cloudflare Radar The new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar provides insights into the latest trends around threats found in malicious email, sources of spam and malicious email, and the adoption of technologies designed to prevent abuse of email.

A final word

Thanks for joining us this week, and stay tuned for our next Innovation Week in early April, focused on the developer community.

Launching email security insights on Cloudflare Radar

Post Syndicated from David Belson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-security-insights-on-cloudflare-radar


During 2021’s Birthday Week, we announced our Email Routing service, which allows users to direct different types of email messages (such as marketing, transactional, or administrative) to separate accounts based on criteria such as the recipient’s address or department. Its capabilities and the volume of messages routed have grown significantly since launch.

Just a few months later, on February 23, 2022, we announced our intent to acquire Area 1 Security to protect users from phishing attacks in email, web, and network environments. Since the completion of the acquisition on April 1, 2022, Area 1’s email security capabilities have been integrated into Cloudflare’s secure access service edge (SASE) solution portfolio, and now processes tens of millions of messages daily.

Processing millions of email messages each day on behalf of our customers gives us a unique perspective on the threats posed by malicious emails, spam volume, the adoption of email authentication methods like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, and the use of IPv4/IPv6 and TLS by email servers. Today, we are launching a new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar to share these perspectives with you. The insights in this new section can help you better understand the state of email security as viewed across various metrics, as well as understanding real-time trends in email-borne threats. (For instance, correlating an observed increase within your organization in messages containing malicious links with a similar increase observed by Cloudflare.) Below, we review the new metrics that are now available on Radar.

Tracking malicious email

As Cloudflare’s email security service processes email messages on behalf of customers, we are able to identify and classify offending messages as malicious. As examples, malicious emails may attempt to trick recipients into sharing personal information like login details, or the messages could attempt to spread malware through embedded images, links, or attachments. The new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar now provides insight at a global level into the aggregate share of processed messages that we have classified as malicious over the selected timeframe. During February 2024, as shown in the figure below, we found that an average of 2.1% of messages were classified as being malicious. Spikes in malicious email volume were seen on February 10 and 11, accounting for as much as 29% of messages. These spikes occurred just ahead of the Super Bowl, in line with previous observations of increases in malicious email volume in the week ahead of the game. Other notable (but lower) spikes were seen on February 13, 15, 17, 24, and 25. The summary and time series data for malicious email share are available through the Radar API.

Threat categorization

The Cloudflare Radar 2023 Year in Review highlighted some of the techniques used by attackers when carrying out attacks using malicious email messages. As noted above, these can include links or attachments leading to malware, as well as approaches like identity deception, where the message appears to be coming from a trusted contact, and brand impersonation, where the message appears to be coming from a trusted brand. In analyzing malicious email messages, Cloudflare’s email security service categorizes the threats that it finds these messages contain. (Note that a single message can contain multiple types of threats — the sender could be impersonating a trusted contact while the body of the email contains a link leading to a fake login page.)

Based on these assessments, Cloudflare Radar now provides insights into trends observed across several different groups of threat types including “Attachment”, “Link”, “Impersonation”, and “Other”. “Attachment” groups individual threat types where the attacker has attached a file to the email message, “Link” groups individual threat types where the attacker is trying to get the user to click on something, and “Impersonation” groups individual threat types where the attacker is impersonating a trusted brand or contact. The “Other” grouping includes other threat types not covered by the previous three.

During February 2024 for the “Link” grouping, as the figure below illustrates, link-based threats were unsurprisingly the most common, and were found in 58% of malicious emails. Since the display text for a link (i.e., hypertext) in HTML can be arbitrarily set, attackers can make a URL appear as if it links to a benign site when, in fact, it is actually malicious. Nearly a third of malicious emails linked to something designed to harvest user credentials. The summary and time series data for these threat categories are available through the Radar API.

For the “Attachment” grouping, during February 2024, nearly 13% of messages were found to have a malicious attachment that when opened or executed in the context of an attack, includes a call-to-action (e.g. lures target to click a link) or performs a series of actions set by an attacker. The share spiked several times throughout the month, reaching as high as 70%. The attachments in nearly 6% of messages attempted to download additional software (presumably malware) once opened.

If an email message appears to be coming from a trusted brand, users may be more likely to open it and take action, like checking the shipping status of a package or reviewing a financial transaction. During February 2024, on average, over a quarter of malicious emails were sent by attackers attempting to impersonate well-known brands. Similar to other threat categories, this one also saw a number of significant spikes, reaching as high as 88% of February 17. Just over 18% of messages were found to be trying to extort users in some fashion. It appears that such campaigns were very active in the week ahead of Valentine’s Day (February 14), although the peak was seen on February 15, at over 95% of messages.

Identity deception occurs when an attacker or someone with malicious intent sends an email claiming to be someone else, whether through use of a similar-looking domain or display name manipulation. This was the top threat category for the “Other” grouping, seen in over 36% of malicious emails during February 2024. The figure below shows three apparent “waves” of the use of this technique — the first began at the start of the month, the second around February 9, and the third around February 20. Over 11% of messages were categorized as malicious because of the reputation of the network (autonomous system) that they were sent from; some network providers are well-known sources of malicious and unwanted email.

Dangerous domains

Top-level domains, also known as TLDs, are found in the right-most portion of a hostname. For example, radar.cloudflare.com is in the .com generic Top Level Domain (gTLD), while bbc.co.uk is in the .uk country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). As of February 2024, there are nearly 1600 Top Level Domains listed in the IANA Root Zone Database. Over the last 15 years or so, several reports have been published that look at the “most dangerous TLDs” — that is, which TLDs are most favored by threat actors. The “top” TLDs in these reports are often a mix of ccTLDs from smaller counties and newer gTLDs. On Radar, we are now sharing our own perspective on these dangerous TLDs, highlighting those where we have observed the largest shares of malicious and spam emails. The analysis is based on the sending domain’s TLD, found in the From: header of an email message. For example, if a message came from [email protected], then example.com is the sending domain, and .com is the associated TLD.

On Radar, users can view shares of spam and malicious email, and can also filter by timeframe and “type” of TLD, with options to view all (the complete list), ccTLDs (country codes), or “classic” TLDs (the original set of gTLDs specified in RFC 1591). Note that spam percentages shown here may be lower than those published in other industry analyses. Cloudflare cloud email security customers may be performing initial spam filtering before messages arrive at Cloudflare for processing, resulting in a lower percentage of messages characterized as spam by Cloudflare.

Looking back across February 2024, we found that new gTLD associates and the ccTLD zw (Zimbabwe) were the TLDs with domains originating the largest shares of malicious email, at over 85% each. New TLDs academy, directory, and bar had the largest shares of spam in email sent by associated domains, at upwards of 95%.

TLDs with the highest percentage of malicious email in February 2024
TLDs with the highest percentage of spam email in February 2024

The figure below breaks out ccTLDs, where we found that at least half of the messages coming from domains in zw (Zimbabwe, at 85%) and bd (Bangladesh, at 50%) were classified as malicious. While the share of malicious email vastly outweighed the share of spam seen from zw domains, it was much more balanced in bd and pw (Palau). A total of 80 ccTLDs saw fewer than 1% of messages classified as malicious in February 2024.

ccTLDs with the highest percentage of malicious email in February 2024

Among the “classic” TLDs, we can see that the shares of both malicious emails and spam are relatively low. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the largest TLD, com has the largest shares of both in February 2024. Given the restrictions around registering int and gov domains, it is interesting to see that even 2% of the messages from associated domains are classified as malicious.

Classic TLDs with the highest percentage of malicious email in February 2024.

The reasons that some TLDs are responsible for a greater share of malicious and/or spam email vary — some may have loose or non-existent registration requirements, some may be more friendly to so-called “domain tasting”, and some may have particularly low domain registration fees.The malicious and spam summary shares per TLD are available through the Radar API.

Adoption of email authentication methods

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three email authentication methods and when used together, they help prevent spammers, phishers, and other unauthorized parties from sending emails on behalf of a domain they do not own.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a way for a domain to list all the servers they send emails from, with SPF records in the DNS listing the IP addresses of all the servers that are allowed to send emails from the domain. Mail servers that receive an email message can check it against the SPF record before passing it on to the recipient’s inbox. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) enables domain owners to automatically “sign” emails from their domain with a digital “signature” that uses cryptography to mathematically verify that the email came from the domain. Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) tells a receiving email server what to do, given the results after checking SPF and DKIM. A domain’s DMARC policy, stored in DMARC records, can be set in a variety of ways, instructing mail servers to quarantine emails that fail SPF or DKIM (or both), to reject such emails, or to deliver them.

These authentication methods have recently taken on increased importance, as both Google and Yahoo! have announced that during the first quarter of 2024, as part of a more aggressive effort to reduce spam, they will require bulk senders to follow best practices that include implementing stronger email authentication using standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. When a given email message is evaluated against these three methods, the potential outcomes are PASS, FAIL, and NONE. The first two are self-explanatory, while NONE means that there was no associated SPF/DKIM/DMARC policy associated with the message’s sending domain.

Reviewing the average shares across February 2024, we find that over 93% of messages passed SPF authentication, while just 2.7% failed. When considering this metric, FAIL is the outcome of greater interest because SPF is easier to spoof than DKIM, and also because failure may be driven by “shadow IT” situations, such as when a company’s Marketing department uses a third party to send email on behalf of the company, but fails to add that third party to the associated SPF records. An average of 88.5% of messages passed DKIM evaluation in February, while just 2.1% failed. For DKIM, the focus should be on PASS, as there are potential non-malicious reasons that a given signature may fail to verify. For DMARC, 86.5% of messages passed authentication, while 4.2% failed, and the combination of PASS and FAIL is the focus, as the presence of an associated policy is of greatest interest for this metric, and whether the message passed or failed less so. For all three methods in this section, NONE indicates the lack of an associated policy. SPF (summary, time series), DKIM (summary, time series), and DMARC (summary, time series) data is available through the Radar API.

Protocol usage

Cloudflare has long evangelized IPv6 adoption, although it has largely been focused on making Web resources available via this not-so-new version of the protocol. However, it’s also important that other Internet services begin to support and use IPv6, and this is an area where our recent research shows that providers may be lacking.

Through analysis of inbound connections from senders’ mail servers to Cloudflare’s email servers, we can gain insight into the distribution of these connections across IPv4 and IPv6. Looking at this distribution for February 2024, we find that 95% of connections were made over IPv4, while only 5% used IPv6. This distribution is in sharp contrast to the share of IPv6 requests for IPv6-capable (dual stacked) Web content, which was 37% for the same time period. The summary and time series data for IPv4/v6 distribution are available through the Radar API.

Cloudflare has also been a long-time advocate for secure connections, launching Universal SSL during 2014’s Birthday Week, to enable secure connections between end users and Cloudflare for all of our customers’ sites (which numbered ~2 million at the time). Over the last 10 years, SSL has completed its evolution to TLS, and although many think of TLS as only being relevant for Web content, possibly due to years of being told to look for the 🔒 padlock in our browser’s address bar, TLS is also used to encrypt client/server connections across other protocols including SMTP (email), FTP (file transfer), and XMPP (messaging).

Similar to the IPv4/v6 analysis discussed above, we can also calculate the share of inbound connections to Cloudflare’s email servers that are using TLS. Messages are encrypted in transit when the connection is made over TLS, while messages sent over unencrypted connections can potentially be read or modified in transit. Fortunately, the vast majority of messages received by Cloudflare’s email servers are made over encrypted connections, with just 6% sent unencrypted during February 2024. The summary and time series data for TLS usage are available through the Radar API.

Conclusion

Although younger Internet users may eschew email in favor of communicating through a variety of messaging apps, email remains an absolutely essential Internet service, relied on by individuals, enterprises, online and offline retailers, governments, and more. However, because email is so ubiquitous, important, and inexpensive, it has also become an attractive threat vector. Cloudflare’s email routing and security services help customers manage and secure their email, and Cloudflare Radar’s new Email Security section can help security researchers, email administrators, and other interested parties understand the latest trends around threats found in malicious email, sources of spam and malicious email, and the adoption of technologies designed to prevent abuse of email.

If you have any questions about this new section, you can contact the Cloudflare Radar team at [email protected] or on social media at @CloudflareRadar (X/Twitter), cloudflare.social/@radar (Mastodon), and radar.cloudflare.com (Bluesky).

Tune in for more news, announcements and thought-provoking discussions! Don’t miss the full Security Week hub page.

Amazon SES: Email Authentication and Getting Value out of Your DMARC Policy

Post Syndicated from Bruno Giorgini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/email-authenctication-dmarc-policy/

Amazon SES: Email Authentication and Getting Value out of Your DMARC Policy

Introduction

For enterprises of all sizes, email is a critical piece of infrastructure that supports large volumes of communication. To enhance the security and trustworthiness of email communication, many organizations turn to email sending providers (ESPs) like Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). These ESPs allow users to send authenticated emails from their domains, employing industry-standard protocols such as the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Messages authenticated with SPF or DKIM will successfully pass your domain’s Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) policy. This blog post will focus on the DMARC policy enforcement mechanism. The blog will explore some of the reasons why email may fail DMARC policy evaluation and propose solutions to fix any failures that you identify. For an introduction to DMARC and how to carefully choose your email sending domain identity, you can refer to Choosing the Right Domain for Optimal Deliverability with Amazon SES The relationship between DMARC compliance and email deliverability rates is crucial for organizations aiming to maintain a positive sender reputation and ensure successful email delivery. There are many advantages when organizations have this correctly setup, these include:

  • Improved Email Deliverability
  • Reduction in Email Spoofing and Phishing
  • Positive Sender Reputation
  • Reduced Risk of Email Marked as Spam
  • Better Email Engagement Metrics
  • Enhanced Brand Reputation

With this foundation, let’s explore the intricacies of DMARC and how it can benefit your organization’s email communication.

What is DMARC?

DMARC is a mechanism for domain owners to advertise SPF and DKIM protection and to tell receivers how to act if those authentication methods fail. The domain’s DMARC policy protects your domain from third parties attempting to spoof the domain in the “From” header of emails. Malicious email messages that aim to send phishing attempts using your domain will be subject to DMARC policy evaluation, which may result in their quarantine or rejection by the email receiving organization. This stringent policy ensures that emails received by email recipients are genuinely from the claimed sending domain, thereby minimizing the risk of people falling victim to email-based scams. Domain owners publish DMARC policies as a TXT record in the domain’s _dmarc.<domain> DNS record. For example, if the domain used in the “From” header is example.com, then the domain’s DMARC policy would be located in a DNS TXT record named _dmarc.example.com. The DMARC policy can have one of three policy modes:

  • A typical DMARC deployment of an existing domain will start with publishing "p=none". A none policy means that the domain owner is in a monitoring phase; the domain owner is monitoring for messages that aren’t authenticated with SPF and DKIM and seeks to ensure all email is properly authenticated
  • When the domain owner is comfortable that all legitimate use cases are properly authenticated with SPF and/or DKIM, they may change the DMARC policy to "p=quarantine". A quarantine policy means that messages which fail to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier via SPF or DKIM will be quarantined by the mail receiving organization. The mail receiving organization may filter these messages into Junk folders, or take another action that they feel best protects their recipients.
  • Finally, domain owners who are confident that all of the legitimate messages using their domain are authenticated with SPF or DKIM, may change the DMARC policy to "p=reject". A reject policy means that messages which fail to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier via SPF or DKIM will be rejected by the mail receiving organization.

The following are examples of a TXT record that contains a DMARC policy, depending on the desired policy (the ‘p’ tag):

  Name Type Value
1 _dmarc.example.com TXT “v=DMARC1;p=reject;rua=mailto:[email protected]
2 _dmarc.example.com TXT “v=DMARC1;p=quarantine;rua=mailto:[email protected]
3 _dmarc.example.com TXT “v=DMARC1;p=none;rua=mailto:[email protected]
Table 1 – Example DMARC policy

This policy tells email providers to apply the DMARC policy to messages that fail to produce a DKIM or SPF authenticated identifier that is aligned to the domain in the “From” header. Alignment means that one or both of the following occurs:

  • The messages pass the SPF policy for the MAIL FROM domain and the MAIL FROM domain is the same as the domain in the “From” header, or a subdomain. Reference Using a custom MAIL FROM domain to learn more about how to send SPF aligned messages with SES.
  • The messages have a DKIM signature signed by a public key in DNS at a location within the domain of the “From” header. Reference Authenticating Email with DKIM in Amazon SES to learn more about how to send DKIM aligned messages with SES.

DMARC reporting

The rua tag in the domain’s DMARC policy indicates the location to which mail receiving organizations should send aggregate reports about messages that pass or fail SPF and DKIM alignment. Domain owners analyze these reports to discover messages which are using the domain in the “From” header but are not properly authenticated with SPF or DKIM. The domain owner will attempt to ensure that all legitimate messages are authenticated through analysis of the DMARC aggregate reports over time. Mail receiving organizations which support sending DMARC reports typically send these aggregated reports once per day, although these practices differ from provider to provider.

What does a typical DMARC deployment look like?

A DMARC deployment is the process of:

  1. Ensuring that all emails using the domain in the “From” header are authenticated with DKIM and SPF domain-aligned identifiers. Focus on DKIM as the primary means of authentication.
  2. Publishing a DMARC policy (none, quarantine, or reject) for the domain that reflects how the domain owner would like mail receiving organizations to handle unauthenticated email claiming to be from their domain.

New domains and subdomains

Deploying a DMARC policy is easy for organizations that have created a new domain or subdomain for the purpose of a new email sending use case on SES; for example email marketing, transaction emails, or one-time pass codes (OTP). These domains can start with the "p=reject" DMARC enforcement policy because the policy will not affect existing email sending programs. This strict enforcement is to ensure that there is no unauthenticated use of the domain and its subdomains.

Existing domains

For existing domains, a DMARC deployment is an iterative process because the domain may have a history of email sending by one or multiple email sending programs. It is important to gain a complete understanding of how the domain and its subdomains are being used for email sending before publishing a restrictive DMARC policy (p=quarantine or p=reject) because doing so would affect any unauthenticated email sending programs using the domain in the “From” header of messages. To get started with the DMARC implementation, these are a few actions to take:

  • Publish a p=none DMARC policy (sometimes referred to as monitoring mode), and set the rua tag to the location in which you would like to receive aggregate reports.
  • Analyze the aggregate reports. Mail receiving organizations will send reports which contain information to determine if the domain, and its subdomains, are being used for sending email, and how the messages are (or are not) being authenticated with a DKIM or SPF domain-aligned identifier. An easy to use analysis tool is the Dmarcian XML to Human Converter.
  • Avoid prematurely publishing a “p=quarantine” or “p=reject” policy. Doing so may result in blocked or reduced delivery of legitimate messages of existing email sending programs.

The image below illustrates how DMARC will be applied to an email received by the email receiving server and actions taken based on the enforcement policy:

DMARC flow Figure 1 – DMARC Flow

How do SPF and DKIM cause DMARC policies to pass

When you start sending emails using Amazon SES, messages that you send through Amazon SES automatically use a subdomain of amazonses.com as the default MAIL FROM domain. SPF evaluators will see that these messages pass the SPF policy evaluation because the default MAIL FROM domain has a SPF policy which includes the IP addresses of the SES infrastructure that sent the message. SPF authentication will result in an “SPF=PASS” and the authenticated identifier is the domain of the MAIL FROM address. The published SPF record applies to every message that is sent using SES regardless of whether you are using a shared or dedicated IP address. The amazonses.com SPF record lists all shared and dedicated IP addresses, so it is inclusive of all potential IP addresses that may be involved with sending email as the MAIL FROM domain. You can use ‘dig’ to look up the IP addresses that SES will use to send email:

dig txt amazonses.com | grep "v=spf1" amazonses.com. 850 IN TXT "v=spf1 ip4:199.255.192.0/22 ip4:199.127.232.0/22 ip4:54.240.0.0/18 ip4:69.169.224.0/20 ip4:23.249.208.0/20 ip4:23.251.224.0/19 ip4:76.223.176.0/20 ip4:54.240.64.0/19 ip4:54.240.96.0/19 ip4:52.82.172.0/22 ip4:76.223.128.0/19 -all"

Custom MAIL FROM domains

It is best practice for customers to configure a custom MAIL FROM domain, and not use the default amazonses.com MAIL FROM domain. The custom MAIL FROM domain will always be a subdomain of the customer’s verified domain identity. Once you configure the MAIL FROM domain, messages sent using SES will continue to result in an “SPF=PASS” as it does with the default MAIL FROM domain. Additionally, DMARC authentication will result in “DMARC=PASS” because the MAIL FROM domain and the domain in the “From” header are in alignment. It’s important to understand that customers must use a custom MAIL FROM domain if they want “SPF=PASS” to result in a “DMARC=PASS”.

For example, an Amazon SES-verified example.com domain will have the custom MAIL FROM domain “bounce.example.com”. The configured SPF record will be:

dig txt bounce.example.com | grep "v=spf1" "v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all"

Note: The chosen MAIL FROM domain could be any sub-domain of your choice. If you have the same domain identity configured in multiple regions, then you should create region-specific custom MAIL FROM domains for each region. e.g. bounce-us-east-1.example.com and bounce-eu-west-2.example.com so that asynchronously bounced messages are delivered directly to the region from which the messages were sent.

DKIM results in DMARC pass

For customers that establish Amazon SES Domain verification using DKIM signatures, DKIM authentication will result in a DKIM=PASS, and DMARC authentication will result in “DMARC=PASS” because the domain that publishes the DKIM signature is aligned to the domain in the “From” header (the SES domain identity).

DKIM and SPF together

Email messages are fully authenticated when the messages pass both DKIM and SPF, and both DKIM and SPF authenticated identifiers are domain-aligned. If only DKIM is domain-aligned, then the messages will still pass the DMARC policy, even if the SPF “pass” is unaligned. Mail receivers will consider the full context of SPF and DKIM when determining how they will handle the disposition of the messages you send, so it is best to fully authenticate your messages whenever possible. Amazon SES has taken care of the heavy lifting of the email authentication process away from our customers, and so, establishing SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication has been reduced to a few clicks which allows SES customers to get started easily and scale fast.

Why is DMARC failing?

There are scenarios when you may notice that messages fail DMARC, whether your messages are fully authenticated, or partially authenticated. The following are things that you should look out for:

Email Content Modification

Sometimes email content is modified during the delivery to the recipients’ mail servers. This modification could be as a result of a security device or anti-spam agent along the delivery path (for example: the message Subject may be modified with an “[EXTERNAL]” warning to recipients). The modified message invalidates the DKIM signature which causes a DKIM failure. Remember, the purpose of DKIM is to ensure that the content of an email has not been tampered with during the delivery process. If this happens, the DKIM authentication will fail with an authentication error similar to “DKIM-signature body hash not verified“.

Solutions:

  • If you control the full path that the email message will traverse from sender to recipient, ensure that no intermediary mail servers modify the email content in transit.
  • Ensure that you configure a custom MAIL FROM domain so that the messages have a domain-aligned SPF identifier.
  • Keep the DMARC policy in monitoring mode (p=none) until these issues are identified/solved.

Email Forwarding

Email Forwarding There are multiple scenarios in which a message may be forwarded, and they may result in both/either SPF and DKIM failing to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier. For SPF, it means that the forwarding mail server is not listed in the MAIL FROM domain’s SPF policy. It is best practice for a forwarding mail server to avoid SPF failures and assume responsibility of mail handling for the messages it forwards by rewriting the MAIL FROM address to be in the domain controlled by the forwarding server. Forwarding servers that do not rewrite the MAIL FROM address pose a risk of impersonation attacks and phishing. Do not add the IP addresses of forwarding servers to your MAIL FROM domain’s SPF policy unless you are in complete control of all sources of mail being forwarded through this infrastructure. For DKIM, it means that the messages are being modified in some way that causes DKIM signature validation failure (see Email Content Modification section above). A responsible forwarding server will rewrite the MAIL FROM domain so that the messages pass SPF with a non-aligned authenticated identifier. These servers will attempt to forward the message without alteration in order to preserve DKIM signatures, but that is sometimes challenging to do in practice. In this scenario, since the messages carry no domain-aligned authenticated identifier, the messages will fail the DMARC policy.

Solution:

  • Email forwarding is an expected type of failure of which you will see in the DMARC aggregate reports. The domain owner must weigh the risk of causing forwarded messages to be rejected against the risk of not publishing a reject DMARC policy. Reference 8.6. Interoperability Considerations. Forwarding servers that wish to forward messages that they know will result in a DMARC failure will commonly rewrite the “From” header address of messages it forwards so that the messages pass a DMARC policy for a domain that the forwarding server is responsible for. The way to identify forwarding servers that rewrite the “From” header in this situation is to publish “p=quarantine pct=0 t=y” in your domain’s DMARC policy before publishing “p=reject”.

Multiple email sending providers are sending using the same domain

Multiple email sending providers: There are situations where an organization will have multiple business units sending email using the same domain, and these business units may be using an email sending provider other than SES. If neither SPF nor DKIM is configured with domain-alignment for these email sending providers, you will see DMARC failures in the DMARC aggregate report.

Solution:

  • Analyze the DMARC aggregate reports to identify other email sending providers, track down the business units responsible for each email sending program, and follow the instructions offered by the email sending provider about how to configure SPF and DKIM to produce a domain-aligned authenticated identifier.

What does a DMARC aggregate report look like?

The following XML example shows the general format of a DMARC aggregate report that you will receive from participating email service providers.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<feedback> 
  <report_metadata> 
    <org_name>email-service-provider-domain.com</org_name> 
    <email>[email protected]</email> 
    <extra_contact_info>https://email-service-provider-domain.com/> 
    <report_id>620501112281841510</report_id> 
    <date_range> 
      <begin>1685404800</begin> 
      <end>1685491199</end> 
    </date_range> 
  </report_metadata> 
  <policy_published> 
    <domain>example.com</domain>
    <adkim>r</adkim> 
    <aspf>r</aspf> 
    <p>none</p> 
    <sp>none</sp> 
    <pct>100</pct> 
  </policy_published> 
  <record> 
    <row> 
      <source_ip>192.0.2.10</source_ip>
      <count>1</count> 
      <policy_evaluated> 
        <disposition>none</disposition> 
        <dkim>pass</dkim> 
        <spf>fail</spf> 
      </policy_evaluated> 
    </row> 
    <identifiers> 
      <header_from>example.com</header_from>
    </identifiers> 
    <auth_results> 
      <dkim> 
        <domain>example.com</domain> 
        <result>pass</result> 
        <selector>gm5h7da67oqhnr3ccji35fdskt</selector> 
      </dkim> 
      <dkim> 
        <domain>amazonses.com</domain> 
        <result>pass</result> 
        <selector>224i4yxa5dv7c2xz3womw6peua</selector> 
      </dkim> 
      <spf> 
        <domain>amazonses.com</domain> 
        <result>pass</result> 
      </spf> 
    </auth_results> 
  </record> 
</feedback> 

 

How to address DMARC deployment for domains confirmed to be unused for email (dangling or otherwise)

Deploying DMARC for unused or dangling domains is a proactive step to prevent abuse or unauthorized use of your domain. Once you have confirmed that all subdomains being used for sending email have the desired DMARC policies, you can publish a ‘p=reject’ tag on the organizational domain, which will prevent unauthorized usage of unused subdomains without the need to publish DMARC policies for every conceivable subdomain. For more advanced subdomain policy scenarios, read the “tree walk” definitions in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dmarc-dmarcbis/

Conclusion:

In conclusion, DMARC is not only a technology but also a commitment to email security, integrity, and trust. By embracing DMARC best practices, organizations can protect their users, maintain a positive brand reputation, and ensure seamless email deliverability. Every message from SES passes SPF and DKIM for “amazonses.com”, but the authenticated identifiers are not always in alignment with the domain in the “From” header which carries the DMARC policy. If email authentication is not fully configured, your messages are susceptible to delivery issues like spam filtering, or being rejected or blocked by the recipient ESP. As a best practice, you can configure both DKIM and SPF to attain optimum deliverability while sending email with SES.

 

About the Authors

Bruno Giorgini Bruno Giorgini is a Senior Solutions Architect specializing in Pinpoint and SES. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry, Bruno has been dedicated to assisting customers of all sizes in achieving their objectives. When he is not crafting innovative solutions for clients, Bruno enjoys spending quality time with his wife and son, exploring the scenic hiking trails around the SF Bay Area.
Jesse Thompson Jesse Thompson is an Email Deliverability Manager with the Amazon Simple Email Service team. His background is in enterprise IT development and operations, with a focus on email abuse mitigation and encouragement of authenticity practices with open standard protocols. Jesse’s favorite activity outside of technology is recreational curling.
Sesan Komaiya Sesan Komaiya is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He works with a variety of customers, helping them with cloud adoption, cost optimization and emerging technologies. Sesan has over 15 year’s experience in Enterprise IT and has been at AWS for 5 years. In his free time, Sesan enjoys watching various sporting activities like Soccer, Tennis and Moto sport. He has 2 kids that also keeps him busy at home.
Mudassar Bashir Mudassar Bashir is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He has over ten years of experience in enterprise software engineering. His interests include web applications, containerization, and serverless technologies. He works with different customers, helping them with cloud adoption strategies.
Priya Priya Singh is a Cloud Support Engineer at AWS and subject matter expert in Amazon Simple Email Service. She has a 6 years of diverse experience in supporting enterprise customers across different industries. Along with Amazon SES, she is a Cloudfront enthusiast. She loves helping customers in solving issues related to Cloudfront and SES in their environment.

 

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

Post Syndicated from Ayush Kumar original http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-email-security-now-works-with-crowdstrike-falcon-logscale/

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

We are excited to announce an extended partnership between CrowdStrike and Cloudflare to bring together Cloudflare Email Security and CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale. With this integration, joint customers who have both Falcon LogScale and Cloudflare Email Security can now send detection data to be ingested and displayed within their Falcon LogScale dashboard.

What is CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale?

CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale enables organizations to ingest, aggregate and analyze massive volumes of streaming log data from a wide array of sources at petabyte scale. It offers search and visualization capabilities, enabling users to easily query and explore their log data to gain valuable insights and identify security threats or anomalies.

Falcon LogScale helps customers by providing:

Log Ingestion It supports the collection of logs from diverse sources and can handle high volumes of log data in real time.

Real-Time Search Users can perform fast searches across their log data, enabling quick detection and investigation of security incidents or operational issues.

Dashboards and Visualizations Falcon LogScale offers customizable dashboards and visualizations to help teams gain insights from their log data.

All of these capabilities enable proactive threat hunting by leveraging advanced analytics. It helps security teams identify potential threats, detect anomalies, and quickly remediate security incidents. Falcon LogScale is designed to handle large-scale log data ingestion and analysis. It can scale to accommodate growing log volumes and provide consistent performance.

Falcon LogScale is the solution for organizations that are looking to consolidate their log management and analysis efforts. It makes monitoring and securing their environments effective and efficient.

How Cloudflare Email works with Falcon LogScale

Customers who have both Cloudflare Email Security and CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale can now send detection data to Falcon LogScale. Within Falcon LogScale, this detection information can be visualized and queried.

To set up Cloudflare Email Security detections to flow into Falcon LogScale, navigate to the Settings section and choose the Marketplace tab in the lefthand toolbar, as shown in the screenshot below.

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

After installing the package, an ingest token needs to be generated. Navigate to the “Ingest Tokens” tab under Settings and create one.

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

Copy the ingest token to save it for later. From here, customers can navigate to the Cloudflare Email Security dashboard, go to the Settings section, select the Alert Webhooks tab and choose “+ New Webhook”. Then click the SIEM option, choose Other from the dropdown, and input the following information:

Auth Token: Bearer [INGEST TOKEN]
Target: https://cloud.community.humio.com/api/v1/ingest/hec/raw

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

Customers can choose which events to send to Falcon LogScale by selecting the expanded option. In the screenshot above, the user has chosen to only send malicious and suspicious detections.

A few minutes after creating a new webhook, Cloudflare Email Security will start sending detection data to the Falcon LogScale instance.

When the Cloudflare Email Security package from the Falcon LogScale marketplace is installed, customers are provided with a parser for field extraction and out-of-box content through a dashboard. The parser allows the Falcon LogScale product to be able to query the detection data while the dashboard allows organizations to quickly get the relevant information about their email security. Below is what the dashboard looks like:

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

As you can see, we have included visualizations and queries to get teams up and running quickly, but it is meant to be a starting point for customers to build on. Customers can write their own queries and use them to create their own widgets. From there, they can create their own rendition of this dashboard to fit their needs.

More information about setting up this integration can be found here: https://library.humio.com/integrations/integrations-cloudflare-package-area1.html

What’s next

We are currently looking to expand the integration of Cloudflare products with Falcon LogScale. Our plan is to extend the integration to the remaining components of the Zero Trust Suite, enabling the relaying of logs and detection data to Falcon LogScale. This will allow customers to visualize and analyze data from these products, similar to the existing Cloudflare Email Security integration. If you are interested and would like to learn more, please reach out to your Cloudflare account contact.

Introducing Cloudflare’s 2023 phishing threats report

Post Syndicated from Elaine Dzuba original http://blog.cloudflare.com/2023-phishing-report/

Introducing Cloudflare's 2023 phishing threats report

Introducing Cloudflare's 2023 phishing threats report

After shutting down a ‘phishing-as-a-service’ operation that impacted thousands of victims in 43 countries, INTERPOL recently noted, “Cyberattacks such as phishing may be borderless and virtual in nature, but their impact on victims is real and devastating.” Business email compromise (BEC), a type of malware-less attack that tricks recipients into transferring funds — for example — has cost victims worldwide more than $50 billion, according to the FBI.

It is estimated that 90% of successful cyber attacks start with email phishing, which continues to be very lucrative for attackers. There is not much today that can be done to stop phishing attempts. However, to prevent successful attacks, it is important to understand (and proactively address) evolving phishing trends — including the ways attackers cleverly exploit intended victims’ trust in “known” email senders. To that end, this week Cloudflare published its first Phishing Threats Report.

This report explores key phishing trends and related recommendations, based on email security data from May 2022 to May 2023. During that time, Cloudflare processed approximately 13 billion emails, which included blocking approximately 250 million malicious messages from reaching customers’ inboxes. The report is also informed by a Cloudflare-commissioned survey of 316 security decision-makers across North America, EMEA, and APAC (you can download that separate study here).

Check out the full report to understand our three key takeaways:

  • Attackers using deceptive links as the #1 phishing tactic — and how they are evolving how they get you to click and when they weaponize the link;
  • Identity deception takes multiple forms (including business email compromise (BEC) and brand impersonation), and can easily bypass email authentication standards;
  • Attackers pretend to be hundreds of different organizations, but they primarily impersonate the entities we trust and need to get work done.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind as you read the 2023 Phishing Threats report.

Email threat categorization

Attackers typically use a combination of social engineering and technical obfuscation techniques to make their messages seem legitimate. Therefore, Cloudflare uses a number of advanced detection techniques to analyze “fuzzy” signals (not just content that’s visible to the naked eye) to identify unwanted emails. Those signals include:

  • Structural analysis of headers, body copy, images, links, attachments, payloads, and more, using heuristics and machine learning models specifically designed for phishing signals;
  • Sentiment analysis to detect changes in patterns and behaviors (e.g., writing patterns and expressions);
  • Trust graphs that evaluate partner social graphs, email sending history, and potential partner impersonations

Our email security service also incorporates threat intelligence from Cloudflare’s global network, which blocks an average of 140 billion cyber threats each day.

Those and many other signals lead to email dispositions of malicious, BEC, spoof, or spam; our dashboard tells customers the specific reasons (i.e., the threat indicator ‘categories’) for a particular email disposition.

Below is a snapshot of the top email threat indicators we observed between May 2, 2022, to May 2, 2023. We categorize threat indicators into more than 30 different categories; over that period, the top threat indicators included deceptive links, domain age (newly registered domains), identity deception, credential harvesting, and brand impersonation.

Introducing Cloudflare's 2023 phishing threats report

Below are brief descriptions of each of the top categories (detailed in more depth in the report’s appendix).

If clicked, a deceptive link will open the user’s default web browser and render the data referenced in the link, or open an application directly (e.g. a PDF). Since the display text for a link (i.e., hypertext) in HTML can be arbitrarily set, attackers can make a URL appear as if it links to a benign site when, in fact, it is actually malicious.

Domain age is related to domain reputation, which is the overall score assigned to a domain.  For example, domains that send out numerous new emails immediately after domain registration will tend to have a poorer reputation, and thus a lower score.

Identity deception occurs when an attacker or someone with malicious intent sends an email claiming to be someone else. The mechanisms and tactics of this vary widely. Some tactics include registering domains that look similar (aka domain impersonation), are spoofed, or use display name tricks to appear to be sourced from a trusted domain. Other variations include sending email using domain fronting and high-reputation web services platforms.

Credential harvesters are set up by an attacker to deceive users into providing their login credentials. Unwitting users may enter their credentials, ultimately providing attackers with access to their accounts.

Brand impersonation is a form of identity deception where an attacker sends a phishing message that impersonates a recognizable company or brand. Brand impersonation is conducted using a wide range of techniques.

An attachment to an email that, when opened or executed in the context of an attack, includes a call-to-action (e.g. lures target to click a link) or performs a series of actions set by an attacker.

Cloudflare regularly observes multiple threat indicators in one phishing email. For example, one Silicon Valley Bank-themed phishing campaign (detailed in this March 2023 blog) combined brand impersonation with a deceptive link and malicious attachment.

Introducing Cloudflare's 2023 phishing threats report

The attackers leveraged the SVB brand in a DocuSign-themed template. The email included HTML code that contains an initial link and a complex redirect chain that is four deep. The included HTML file in the attack would have sent the recipient to a WordPress instance that has recursive redirection capability.

(Speaking of links, deceptive links were the #1 threat category, appearing in 35.6% of our detections. And attackers aren’t just using links in email channels; the rise of multi-channel phishing threats — which exploit other applications such as SMS/text, chat, and social media — are also covered in the report).

Trusted (and most impersonated) brands

Silicon Valley Bank was just one of approximately 1,000 different brands we observed being impersonated in emails targeting Cloudflare customers between May 2022 and May 2023. (Cloudflare employees were directly targeted via brand impersonation in the “Oktapus” phishing attack that the Cloudflare One suite of products thwarted in July 2022).

However, as detailed in the Phishing Threats Report, we observed that email attackers most often (51.7% of the time) impersonated one of 20 well-known global brands, with Microsoft being #1 on their list.

Rank Impersonated brand
1 Microsoft
2 World Health Organization
3 Google
4 SpaceX
5 Salesforce
6 Apple
7 Amazon
8 T-Mobile
9 YouTube
10 MasterCard
11 Notion.so
12 Comcast
13 Line Pay
14 MasterClass
15 Box
16 Truist Financial Corp
17 Facebook
18 Instagram
19 AT&T
20 Louis Vuitton

Example of a Microsoft credential harvesting attempt

Earlier this year, Cloudflare detected and blocked a phishing campaign leveraging the Microsoft brand in an attempt to harvest credentials through a legitimate — but compromised — site.

In the email example below, there is no text in the body of the email despite its appearance. The entire body is a hyperlinked JPEG image. Thus, if the recipient clicks anywhere in the body (even if they don’t intend to click the link), they are effectively clicking the link.

Introducing Cloudflare's 2023 phishing threats report

Initially, the hyperlink for this image appears to be a benign Baidu URL – hxxp://www.baidu[.]com/link?url=-yee3T9X9U41UHUa3VV6lx1j5eX2EoI6XpZqfDgDcf-2NYQ8RVpOn5OYkDTuk8Wg#<recipient’s email address base64 encoded>.  However, if this link is clicked, the target’s browser would be redirected to a site that had been compromised and used to host a credential harvester.

The attacker used Microsoft Office 365 branding, but attempted to circumvent any brand detection techniques by including the brand information within the image (i.e., there was no plaintext or HTML text that could be inspected to identify the brand).

However, using optical character recognition (OCR), Cloudflare successfully identified “Office 365” and “Microsoft” in the image. Using OCR, we also identified the use of suspicious account lures related to passwords.

In this example, attackers’ techniques included:

  • Inclusion of only a JPEG image (impossible to detect words without OCR)
  • Embedding a hyperlink in that image (clicking anywhere in the body would result in clicking the link)
  • Hyperlinking to a Baidu URL (used to bypass reputation-based URL detection techniques)
  • The Baidu URL redirecting the recipient’s browser to a credential harvesting site (i.e., would circumvent other email security defenses that are not capable of deep link inspection)
  • Hosting the credential harvester on a legitimate site that had been compromised by the attacker (even with deep link inspection, will again attempt to bypass URL detection techniques based on reputation)

This attack vector leverages the high reputation and authenticity of Baidu to bypass the reputation of the true host/IP where the credential harvester is hosted.

While this specific campaign focused on harvesting Microsoft credentials, we often see attackers using similar methods to bypass brand detection techniques and trick victims into downloading malware and other malicious payloads.

URL redirection techniques are often seen in phishing campaigns, but threat actors are continuing to refine their approach by abusing more and more legitimate domains like baidu.com, bing.com, goo.gl, etc. Our numerous detection capabilities allow us to conduct deep link inspection of URLs using redirection techniques of all kinds, including those that abuse legitimate domains.

What about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC?

Email authentication (specifically the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards) are often mentioned as useful against brand impersonation: these standards help validate server and tenant origins, protect message integrity, provide policy enforcement, and more.

However, attackers can still find ways to bypass authentication to trick email suites; and we actually observed that 89% of unwanted messages “passed” SPF, DKIM, and/or DMARC checks.

Some limitations of email authentication include:

SPF
(Sender Policy Framework)
Key benefits:
Validating server origin (i.e., validates where a message originates from)
Defining which email servers and services are allowed to send messages on a domain owner’s behalf
Limitations:
Does not prevent lookalike email, domain, or display name spoofing
Does not validate the “From” header; uses envelope “From” to determine sending domain
Validation ineffective when emails are forwarded or when messages sent to a mailing list are sent to each subscriber
SPF evaluation process can be limited to a certain number of DNS lookups
Does not protect against attacks using “validated” emails with embedded URLs, malicious payloads, or attachments
DKIM
(Domain Keys Identified Mail)
Key benefits:
Providing tenant origin validation (i.e., checks that an email was sent/authorized by the owner of the domain via a digital signature)
Ensuring email is not altered while transferred from server to server; protecting message integrity
Limitations:
Does not prevent lookalike email, domain, or display name spoofing
Does not protect against replay attacks (DKIM only signs specific parts of a message. Attackers can add other header fields to emails passing DKIM then forward them.)
Does not protect against attacks using “validated” emails with embedded URLs, malicious payloads or attachments
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) Key benefits:
Providing policy enforcement and reporting for SPF and DKIM
Stipulating what policy to follow if an email doesn’t pass SPF or DKIM authentication (e.g. reject/delete, quarantine, no policy/send)
Reporting function allows domain owners to see who is sending email on their behalf (i.e., protecting against spoofing of your own domain and brand abuse)
Limitations:
Does not prevent spoofing of another brand’s domain
Does not prevent lookalike email, domain, or display name spoofing
Domain owners specify what percentage of mail DMARC policies it applies to; application percentages of less than 100% are less effective
Does not protect against attacks using “validated” emails with embedded URLs, malicious payloads or attachments

Conclusions

Attackers are constantly evolving their tactics. Multiple protection layers must be enacted before, during, and after messages reach the inbox. Cloudflare never inherently “trusts” any type of email communication (whether it appears to be internal, external, or from a ‘known’ business partner).

Likewise, we recommend that — first and foremost — all organizations extend the Zero Trust security model of “never trust, always verify” not just to the network and applications, but also to the email inbox.

In addition to securing email with a Zero Trust approach, we also recommend:

  • Augmenting cloud email with multiple anti-phishing controls. As noted in this Forrester blog from June, “The use of messaging, collaboration, file sharing, and enterprise software-as-a-service applications across multiple devices all contribute to employee productivity and experience. Many of these environments are considered ‘closed,’ but one successful phish of a supply chain partner’s credentials opens your organization up to data loss, credential theft, fraud, and ransomware attacks. Protections developed for the email inbox must extend to these environments and throughout the day-to-day workflows of your employees.”
  • Adopting phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA). While not all MFA provides the same layer of security, hardware security keys are among the most secure authentication methods for preventing successful phishing attacks. They can protect networks even if attackers gain access to usernames and passwords.
  • Make it harder for humans to make mistakes.  Meet employees and teams where they are by making the tools they already use more secure, and preventing them from making mistakes. For example, remote browser isolation (RBI) technology, when integrated with cloud email security, can automatically isolate suspicious email links to prevent users from being exposed to potentially malicious web content. Keyboard inputs can also be disabled on untrusted websites, protecting users from accidentally entering sensitive information within a form fill or credential harvesting. This provides a layer of defense against multi-channel phishing attacks by effectively allowing users to safely open links without disrupting their workflow.

If you’re interested in the full findings, you can download the 2023 Phishing Threats Report here, as well as our recommendations for preventing successful phishing attacks. And if you’d like to see Cloudflare’s email security in action, you can request a free phishing risk assessment here.

Manage Incoming Emails at Scale with Amazon SES

Post Syndicated from Bruno Giorgini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/manage-incoming-emails-with-ses/

Introduction

Are you looking for an efficient way to handle incoming emails and streamline your email processing workflows? In this blog post, we’ll guide you through setting up Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for incoming email, focusing on the setup, monitoring, and use of receipt rules to optimize your email handling.

Amazon SES is a powerful and flexible cloud-based email service that enables you to send and receive emails at scale, while ensuring high deliverability and maintaining compliance with email best practices. By using Amazon SES for incoming email, you can customize your email processing pipeline and seamlessly integrate with other AWS services such as Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and Amazon SNS.

We’ll start by walking you through the process of verifying your domain and setting up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to ensure your emails are secure and authenticated. Next, we’ll explain how to create and manage receipt rule sets and add receipt rules with various actions for different processing scenarios. We’ll also cover monitoring your email processing using Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

As we progress, we’ll dive into advanced topics such as conditional receipt rules and chaining receipt rules, which can help you build complex and tailored email processing workflows, including multi-tenant scenarios. By the end of this post, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of how to harness the power of Amazon SES for your incoming email needs.

So, let’s get started on simplifying your incoming email processing with Amazon SES!

Setting up Amazon SES for email receiving

Identifying the AWS region

For new users of the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) inbound feature, it’s important to understand that all AWS resources used for receiving email with Amazon SES, except for Amazon S3 buckets, need to be in the same AWS Region as the Amazon SES endpoint. This means that if you are using Amazon SES in a specific region, such as US West (Oregon), any additional resources like Amazon SNS topics, AWS KMS keys, and Lambda functions also need to be created in the same US West (Oregon) Region. Additionally, to successfully receive email with Amazon SES within a particular Region, you must create an active receipt rule set specifically in that Region. By adhering to these guidelines, new users can effectively configure and utilize the inbound feature of Amazon SES, ensuring seamless email reception and efficient management of related resources. Amazon SES only supports email receiving in certain AWS Regions. For a complete list of Regions where email receiving is supported, see Amazon Simple Email Service endpoints and quotas in the AWS General Reference.

Verifying your domain

Before you can start receiving emails with Amazon SES, you must verify your domain. Domain verification is a crucial step in the setup process, as it confirms your ownership of the domain and helps prevent unauthorized use. In this section, we’ll walk you through the process of verifying your domain in the Amazon SES console.

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
  3. In the list of Identities section, choose Create identity.
  4. Under Identity details, choose Domain as the Identity type field. You must have access to the domain’s DNS settings to complete the domain verification process.
  5. Enter the name of the domain or subdomain in the Domain field.
  6. You must configure DKIM as part of the domain verification process. For Advanced DKIM settings, ensure that the Enabled box is checked in the DKIM signatures field.
  7. Choose Create identity. 
  8. This will generate a list of DNS records that you need to add to your domain’s DNS configuration. These can be found in the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) container, under Publish DNS records.

    SES DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

    Publish DNS records

  9. Add the generated DNS records to your domain’s DNS configuration. These records include a Legacy TXT record for domain verification and CNAME records for DKIM authentication. You may need to consult your domain registrar’s documentation for instructions on adding DNS records.
  10. Once the DNS records have been added, return to the Amazon SES console and wait for your domain’s verification status to change from “Verification pending” to “Verified.” This process may take up to 72 hours, depending on your domain registrar’s DNS propagation time.

Publishing an MX record for Amazon SES email receiving

To enable email receiving with Amazon SES, you need to publish an MX (Mail Exchange) record in your domain’s DNS configuration. The MX record directs incoming emails to Amazon SES for processing. Follow these steps to publish the MX record:

  1. Log in to your domain registrar or DNS management console.
  2. Locate the DNS management section for your domain.
  3. Create a new MX record by specifying the following details:
    • Host/Name/Record: Leave this field blank or enter “@” to represent the root domain.
    • Value/Points to/Target: Enter the value “10 inbound-smtp.[AWS Region].amazonaws.com“, replacing [AWS Region] with the AWS region where you are using Amazon SES for email receiving. For example, if you are using US West (Oregon) region, the value should be “10 inbound-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com“.
    • TTL (Time to Live): Set a TTL value according to your preference or leave it as the default.
  4. Save the MX record.

Once the MX record is published with the correct value, incoming emails addressed to your domain will be routed to Amazon SES for processing. Remember to ensure that any other email-related resources, such as SNS topics or Lambda functions, are also created in the same AWS region as your Amazon SES endpoint.

For more detailed information on publishing MX records for Amazon SES email receiving, you can refer to the official documentation.

Creating a Receipt Rule set

A receipt rule set is a collection of rules that define how Amazon SES processes incoming emails for your domain. Each rule contains one or more actions that determine the processing flow of incoming emails. In this section, we’ll guide you through the process of creating a new receipt rule set in the Amazon SES console and activating it for your domain.

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Email receiving.
    • Note: if you don’t see the Email receiving option in the menu, check again that you’re in fact in a region supporting this feature.
  3. Under the Receipt rule sets tab in the Email receiving pane, choose Create rule setimage-20230523131953561.png
  4. Enter a name for your new rule set in the Rule set name field. This name should be descriptive and easy to identify, such as “MyApp-IncomingEmail.”
  5. After entering a unique name, choose Create rule setimage-20230523132526096.png
  6. To activate the newly created rule set, choose Set as active next to your rule set’s name. This action will ensure that Amazon SES uses this rule set for processing incoming emails to your domain. Your new rule set will now be listed in the Active rule set section.

For more information on creating and managing receipt rule sets, you can refer to the official documentation.

In the next section, we’ll explore adding receipt rules to your rule set, which define the specific actions to be taken for incoming emails.

Adding Receipt Rules

Receipt rules define the specific actions that Amazon SES should take when processing incoming emails for your domain. Common actions include saving the email to an Amazon S3 bucket, invoking an AWS Lambda function, or publishing a notification to an Amazon SNS topic. In this section, we’ll guide you through the process of adding receipt rules to your rule set in the Amazon SES console and provide examples of when to use each action.

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Email receiving.
  3. Under the Email receiving pane, in the Receipt rule sets tab, select the name of your active rule set from the All rule sets section. This will navigate to the details page for that rule set.
  4. Choose Create rule to begin creating a new receipt rule.
  5. On the Define rule settings page, under Receipt rule details, enter a unique Rule name.
    • For Status, only clear the Enabled checkbox if you don’t want to run this rule after creation.
    • (Optional) For Transport Layer Security (TLS), by selecting Required you can enforce a specific TLS policy for incoming emails that match this rule. By default, Amazon SES will use the Optional policy, which means it will attempt to use TLS but will not require it.
    • For Spam and virus scanning, only clear the Enabled checkbox if you don’t want Amazon SES to scan incoming messages for spam and viruses.
  6. After entering a unique rule name, choose Next.
  7. On the Add recipients conditions page, under Recipients conditions, use the following procedure to specify one or more recipient conditions. You can have a maximum of 100 recipient conditions per receipt rule.
    • Under Recipient condition, specify the email addresses or domains that this rule should apply to. You can use wildcards to match multiple addresses or domains. For example, you can enter example.com and .example.com to apply the rule to all email addresses within the example.com domain and within all of its subdomains.
    • Repeat this step for each recipient condition you want to add. When you finish adding recipient conditions, choose Next.
  8. On the Add actions page, open the Add new action menu and select the desired action from the list, such as Deliver to S3 bucket, Invoke AWS Lambda function, or Publish to Amazon SNS topic. Configure the selected action’s settings as required.
    • Deliver to S3 bucket: Choose this action if you’re expecting emails with large attachments, need to store emails for archival purposes, or plan to process emails using other AWS services that integrate with Amazon S3. You’ll need to specify the Amazon S3 bucket where the incoming emails should be stored.
    • Invoke AWS Lambda function: Choose this action if you want to process incoming emails using custom logic, such as filtering, parsing, or modifying the email content. You’ll need to specify the AWS Lambda function that should be invoked when an incoming email matches this rule.
    • Publish to Amazon SNS topic: Choose this action if you’re processing smaller emails or want to receive real-time notifications when an email arrives. You’ll need to specify the Amazon SNS topic where notifications should be published.
    • For more information and additional actions, see the Action options section of the Developer Guide.
  9. Once configured, choose Next to proceed to the Review page.
  10. On the Review page, review the settings and actions of the rule. If you need to make changes, choose the Edit option.
  11. When finished, choose Create rule to add the new receipt rule to your rule set. The rule will now be applied to incoming emails that match the specified recipient conditions.
image.png

You can create multiple receipt rules within a rule set, each with different actions and conditions. Amazon SES will apply the rules in the order they appear in the rule set. For more information on creating and managing receipt rules, you can refer to the official documentation.

Monitoring your incoming email

Configuring Amazon CloudWatch metrics

Once you have enabled email receiving in Amazon SES and created receipt rules for your emails, you can monitor and view the metrics using Amazon CloudWatch. Follow these steps to configure Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon SES email receiving:

  1. Open the Amazon CloudWatch console.
  2. Navigate to the Metrics section and select All metrics.
  3. In the list of available metrics, locate and select SES to view SES-related metrics.
  4. Expand the Receipt Rule Set Metrics and Receipt Rule Metrics sections to access the specific metrics for your receipt rule sets and rules.
  5. Under Receipt Rule Set Metrics, you will find the following metrics:
    • “Received”: Indicates whether SES successfully received a message that has at least one rule applying. The metric value is always 1.
    • “PublishSuccess”: Indicates whether SES successfully executed all rules within a rule set.
    • “PublishFailure”: Indicates if SES encountered an error while executing rules within a rule set. The error may allow for retrying the execution.
    • “PublishExpired”: Indicates that SES will no longer retry executing the rules within a rule set after four hours.

These metrics can be filtered by the dimension RuleSetName to obtain data specific to individual rule sets.

  1. Under Receipt Rule Metrics, you will find the following metrics:
    • “Received”: Indicates whether SES successfully received a message and will try to process the applied rule. The metric value is always 1.
    • “PublishSuccess”: Indicates whether SES successfully executed a rule that applies to the received message.
    • “PublishFailure”: Indicates if SES encountered an error while executing the actions in a rule. The error may allow for retrying the execution.
    • “PublishExpired”: Indicates that SES will no longer retry executing the actions of a rule after four hours.

These metrics can be filtered by the dimension RuleName to obtain data specific to individual rules.

  1. Note that the metrics will only appear in the CloudWatch console if you have enabled email receiving, created receipt rules, and received mail that matches any of your rules.
  2. Keep in mind that changes made to fix your receipt rule set will only apply to emails received by Amazon SES after the update. Emails are always evaluated against the receipt rule set in place at the time of receipt.

Amazon SES also provides an Automatic Dashboard for SES in the CloudWatch console, which offers a preconfigured set of SES metrics and alarms to monitor your email sending and receiving activity. This dashboard provides a consolidated view of key metrics, making it easier to track the performance and health of your Amazon SES environment.

By configuring Amazon CloudWatch metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the performance and execution of your receipt rule sets and rules within Amazon SES. For more detailed information on viewing metrics for Amazon SES email receiving using Amazon CloudWatch, refer to the official documentation.

Using receipt rules effectively

Chaining Receipt Rules

Chaining receipt rules enable you to create sophisticated email processing workflows by linking multiple rules together, allowing each rule to apply specific actions based on the outcome of the previous rule. This advanced technique can help you achieve greater flexibility and precision in handling your incoming emails with Amazon SES. In this section, we’ll explain how to create chained receipt rules and provide examples of common use cases.

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console.
  2. Under the Email receiving pane, in the Receipt rule sets tab, select the name of your active rule set from the All rule sets section
  3. Review the existing rules in your rule set and ensure that they are ordered correctly. Chaining relies on the order of the rules, as each rule’s conditions and actions are evaluated sequentially. Under the Reorder tab, the rule orders can be modified by selecting the corresponding arrow associated with each.
  4. To chain additional rules, follow the steps previously outlined in the Adding Receipt Rules section and adjust the rule orders as necessary.

Chaining receipt rules can help you build complex email processing workflows with Amazon SES. Some common use cases include:

  • Executing multiple filtering criteria in an order that you specify. For example, adding a specific header value and then sending to additional AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, or AWS Lambda.
  • Creating multi-stage processing pipelines, where the output of one action (e.g., saving an email to Amazon S3) is used as the input for the next action (e.g., processing the email with AWS Lambda).
  • Implementing fallback actions, where the first rule in the chain attempts a specific action (e.g., saving an email to a primary S3 bucket), and if it fails, the next rule in the chain applies a different action (e.g., saving the email to a secondary S3 bucket).

The following figure shows how receipt rules, rule sets, and actions relate to each other.

SES Chaining multiple rules in a rule set

For more information on creating and managing receipt rules, you can refer to the official documentation.

Handling the 200 Receipt Rules per Rule Set limit

For each AWS account, Amazon SES imposes a limit of 200 receipt rules per receipt rule set. While this limit is sufficient for most use cases, there might be situations where you need to process a higher volume of incoming emails with more complex rule sets. These are some strategies to work around the 200 receipt rule limit using Amazon SES and other AWS services:

  • Utilize rule chaining: As mentioned earlier, chaining receipt rules allows you to link multiple rules together, effectively extending the number of actions you can perform for a single email. By chaining rules, you can create more complex processing workflows without exceeding the 200 rule limit.
  • Combine rules with actions: Instead of creating separate rules for each scenario, consider combining multiple actions within a single rule. This approach can help you reduce the total number of rules while still catering to various email processing requirements.
  • Use AWS Lambda for custom processing: Leverage AWS Lambda to perform custom processing on incoming emails. By incorporating Lambda functions in your receipt rules, you can handle more complex processing tasks without increasing the number of rules. This approach also allows you to offload some processing logic from Amazon SES to Lambda, providing additional flexibility.
  • Consolidate similar actions: If you have several rules performing similar actions, it is advisable to consolidate them into a single rule with multiple actions. This consolidation can help you reduce the total number of rules while maintaining the desired functionality.
  • Evaluate rule usage: Regularly review and evaluate your existing receipt rules to identify any rules that are no longer in use or can be optimized. Removing or consolidating unnecessary rules can help you stay within the 200 rule limit while still addressing your email processing requirements.

By implementing these strategies, you can effectively work around the 200 receipt rule limit in Amazon SES and build more complex email processing workflows to cater to your specific needs. Remember to monitor and optimize your rule sets regularly to make the most of the available resources and maintain efficient email processing.

For more information on the inbound quotas and limits in Amazon SES, you can refer to the official AWS documentation at Quotas related to email receiving.

Best Practices for multi-tenant scenarios

When dealing with multi-tenant scenarios in your application, it’s crucial to manage incoming emails efficiently to ensure smooth operation and a seamless experience for your users. In this section, we’ll provide best practices to handle incoming emails in multi-tenant environments using Amazon SES.

In a multi-tenant scenario, where multiple customers or tenants share a single AWS account, it’s important to consider the limit of 200 receipt rules per receipt rule set imposed by Amazon SES. To ensure compliance with this limit and maintain optimal email processing, the following practices are recommended:

  • Segregate tenants using email subdomains: Create unique subdomains for each tenant and route their incoming emails accordingly. This approach makes it easier to manage email processing rules and helps isolate tenants from potential issues.
  • Create separate rule sets for each tenant: By creating dedicated rule sets for each tenant, you can maintain better control over email processing rules and actions specific to their needs. This can simplify management and make it easier to update rules for individual tenants without affecting others.
  • Use tags to identify tenant-specific emails: Apply tags to incoming emails using the AddHeader action in your receipt rules. These tags can include tenant-specific identifiers, which will help you route and process emails correctly. You can later use these tags in other AWS services (e.g., AWS Lambda) to process tenant-specific emails.
  • Leverage conditional receipt rules: Utilize conditional receipt rules to apply tenant-specific processing based on email headers, recipients, or other criteria. This way, you can ensure that the right actions are taken for each tenant’s incoming emails.
  • Monitor tenant-specific metrics: Configure Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms for each tenant to track their email processing performance separately. This enables you to keep a close eye on individual tenants and take appropriate actions when needed.
  • Implement rate limiting: To prevent tenants from overwhelming your email processing pipeline, consider implementing rate limiting based on the number of incoming emails per tenant. This can help ensure fair resource allocation and prevent potential abuse.
  • Ensure security and privacy: Always encrypt tenant data at rest and in transit, and follow best practices for data protection and privacy. Consider using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to manage encryption keys for each tenant.
  • Test and validate rule sets: Before deploying rule sets for tenants, thoroughly test and validate them to ensure they function as intended. This can help prevent unexpected behavior and maintain a high level of service quality.

By following these best practices for handling incoming emails in multi-tenant scenarios with Amazon SES, you can ensure a robust and efficient email processing pipeline that caters to each tenant’s unique requirements. As you continue to work with Amazon SES in multi-tenant environments, stay up to date with AWS documentation and best practices to further optimize your email processing workflows.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve explored how to set up Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for incoming email processing using receipt rules, rule sets, and various actions. We’ve covered domain verification, DKIM setup, creating and managing rule sets, adding receipt rules, and configuring Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms. We’ve also delved into advanced topics such as chaining receipt rules for more complex email processing workflows.

By following this guide, you can effectively leverage Amazon SES to process and manage your incoming emails, optimizing your email workflows, and maintaining high email deliverability standards. With Amazon SES, you can customize your email processing pipeline to meet your specific needs and seamlessly integrate with other AWS services such as Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon CloudWatch.

In future blog posts, we will explore monitoring and alerting in more detail, providing you with additional insights on how to effectively monitor your email processing pipelines and set up alerts for critical events. Stay tuned for more information on this important aspect of managing your email infrastructure.

As you continue to work with Amazon SES and its email receiving capabilities, remember to review AWS best practices and documentation to stay up to date with new features and improvements. Don’t hesitate to experiment with different rule sets, actions, and conditions to find the perfect email processing solution for your use case.

Amazon SES – How to set up EasyDKIM for a new domain

Post Syndicated from Vinay Ujjini original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/amazon-ses-how-to-set-up-easydkim-for-a-new-domain/

What is email authentication and why is it important?

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) lets you reach customers confidently without an on-premises Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) system. Amazon SES provides built-in support for email authentication protocols, including DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, which help improve the deliverability and authenticity of outgoing emails.

Email authentication is the process of verifying the authenticity of an email message to ensure that it is sent from a legitimate source and has not been tampered with during transmission. Email authentication methods use cryptographic techniques to add digital signatures or authentication headers to outgoing emails, which can be verified by email receivers to confirm the legitimacy of the email.

Email authentication helps establish a sender’s reputation as a trusted sender. Additionally, when email receivers can verify that emails are legitimately sent from a sender’s domain using authentication methods, it also helps establish the sender’s reputation as a trusted sender. Email authentication involves one or more technical processes used by mail systems (sending and receiving) that make certain key information in an email message verifiable. Email authentication generates signals about the email, which can be utilized in decision-making processes related to spam filtering and other email handling tasks.

There are currently two widely used email authentication mechanisms – SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). They provide information that the receiving domain can use to verify that the sending of the message was authorized in some way by the sending domain. DKIM can also help determine that the content was not altered in transit. And the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) protocol allows sending domains to publish verifiable policies that can help receiving domains decide how best to handle messages that fail authentication by SPF and DKIM.

Email authentication protocols:

  1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework): SPF is an email authentication protocol that checks which IP addresses are authorized to send mail on behalf of the originating domain. Domain owners use SPF to tell email providers which servers are allowed to send email from their domains. This is an email validation standard that’s designed to prevent email spoofing.
  2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM is an email authentication protocol that allows a domain to attach its identifier to a message. This asserts some level of responsibility or involvement with the message. A sequence of messages signed with the same domain name is assumed to provide a reliable base of information about mail associated with the domain name’s owner, which may feed into an evaluation of the domain’s “reputation”. It uses public-key cryptography to sign an email with a private key. Recipient servers can then use a public key published to a domain’s DNS to verify that parts of the emails have not been modified during the transit.
  3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): is an email authentication protocol that uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to detect email spoofing. In order to comply with DMARC, messages must be authenticated through either SPF or DKIM, or both.

Let us dive deep into DKIM in this blog. Amazon SES provides three options for signing your messages using a DKIM signature:

  1. Easy DKIM: To set up a sending identity so that Amazon SES generates a public-private key pair and automatically adds a DKIM signature to every message that you send from that identity.
  2. BYODKIM (Bring Your Own DKIM): To provide your own public-private key pair for so SES adds a DKIM signature to every message that you send from that identity, see Provide your own DKIM authentication token (BYODKIM) in Amazon SES.
  3. Manually add DKIM signature: To add your own DKIM signature to email that you send using the SendRawEmail API, see Manual DKIM signing in Amazon SES.

The purpose of EasyDKIM is to simplify the process of generating DKIM keys, adding DKIM signatures to outgoing emails, and managing DKIM settings, making it easier for users to implement DKIM authentication for their email messages. Using EasyDKIM, Amazon SES aims to improve email deliverability, prevent email fraud and phishing attacks, establish sender reputation, enhance brand reputation, and comply with industry regulations or legal requirements. EasyDKIM doubles as domain verification (simplification) and it eliminates the need for customers to worry about DKIM key rotation (managed automation). By automating and simplifying the DKIM process, EasyDKIM helps users ensure the integrity and authenticity of their email communications, while reducing the risk of fraudulent activities and improving the chances of emails being delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

Setting up Easy DKIM in Amazon SES:

When you set up Easy DKIM for a domain identity, Amazon SES automatically adds a 2048-bit DKIM signature to every email that you send from that identity. You can configure EasyDKIM by using the Amazon SES console, or by using the API.

The procedure in this section is streamlined to just show the steps necessary to configure Easy DKIM on a domain identity that you’ve already created. If you haven’t yet created a domain identity or you want to see all available options for customizing a domain identity, such as using a default configuration set, custom MAIL FROM domain, and tags, see Creating a domain identity. Part of creating an Easy DKIM domain identity is configuring its DKIM-based verification where you will have the choice to either accept the Amazon SES default of 2048 bits, or to override the default by selecting 1024 bits. Steps to set up easyDKIM for a verified identity:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon SES console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ses/
  2. In the navigation pane, under Configuration, choose Verified identities.
  3. List of verified identities in SES console

    Verified identities

  4. In the list of identities, choose an identity where the Identity type is Domain.
  5. Under the Authentication tab, in the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) container, choose Edit.
  6. In the Advanced DKIM settings container, choose the Easy DKIM button in the Identity type field.
  7. Choose EasyDKIM as identity type; RSA_2048_BITT in DKIM signing key length; Check Enabled checkbox under DKIM signatures.

    DKIM settings

  8. In the DKIM signing key length field, choose either RSA_2048_BIT or RSA_1024_BIT.
  9. In the DKIM signatures field, check the Enabled box.
  10. Choose Save changes.
  11. After configuring your domain identity with Easy DKIM, you must complete the verification process with your DNS provider – proceed to Verifying a DKIM domain identity with your DNS provider and follow the DNS authentication procedures for Easy DKIM.

Conclusion:

Email authentication, especially DKIM, is crucial in securing your emails, establishing sender reputation, and improving email deliverability. EasyDKIM provides a simplified and automated way to implement DKIM authentication. It removes the hassles of generating DKIM keys and managing settings, while additionally reducing risks and and enhancing sender authenticity. By following the steps outlined in this blog post, you can easily set up easyDKIM in Amazon SES and start using DKIM authentication for your email campaigns.

About the Author

Vinay Ujjini is an Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service Worldwide Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He has been solving customer’s omni-channel challenges for over 15 years. He is an avid sports enthusiast and in his spare time, enjoys playing tennis & cricket.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

Post Syndicated from Joao Sousa Botto original https://blog.cloudflare.com/dmarc-management/

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

At the end of 2021 Cloudflare launched Security Center, a unified solution that brings together our suite of security products and unique Internet intelligence. It enables security teams to quickly identify potential security risks and threats to their organizations, map their attack surface and mitigate these risks with just a few clicks. While Security Center initially focused on application security, we are now adding crucial zero trust insights to further enhance its capabilities.

When your brand is loved and trusted, customers and prospects are looking forward to the emails you send them. Now picture them receiving an email from you: it has your brand, the subject is exciting, it has a link to register for something unique — how can they resist that opportunity?

But what if that email didn’t come from you? What if clicking on that link is a scam that takes them down the path of fraud or identity theft? And what if they think you did it? The truth is, even security minded people occasionally fall for well crafted spoof emails.

That poses a risk to your business and reputation. A risk you don’t want to take – no one does. Brand impersonation is a significant problem for organizations globally, and that’s why we’ve built DMARC Management – available in Beta today.

With DMARC Management you have full insight on who is sending emails on your behalf. You can one-click approve each source that is a legitimate sender for your domain, and then set your DMARC policy to reject any emails sent from unapproved clients.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

When the survey platform your company uses is sending emails from your domain, there’s nothing to worry about – you configured it that way. But if an unknown mail service from a remote country is sending emails using your domain that can be quite scary, and something you’ll want to address. Let’s see how.

Anti-spoofing mechanisms

Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) are three common email authentication methods. Together, they help prevent spammers, phishers, and other unauthorized parties from sending emails on behalf of a domain they do not own.

SPF is a way for a domain to list all the servers the company sends emails from. Think of it like a publicly available employee directory that helps someone to confirm if an employee works for an organization. SPF records list all the IP addresses of all the servers that are allowed to send emails from the domain.

DKIM enables domain owners to automatically “sign” emails from their domain. Specifically, DKIM uses public key cryptography:

  1. A DKIM record stores the domain’s public key, and mail servers receiving emails from the domain can check this record to obtain the public key.
  2. The private key is kept secret by the sender, who signs the email’s header with this key.
  3. Mail servers receiving the email can verify that the sender’s private key was used by applying the public key. This also guarantees that the email was not tampered with while in transit.

DMARC tells a receiving email server what to do after evaluating the SPF and DKIM results. A domain’s DMARC policy can be set in a variety of ways — it can instruct mail servers to quarantine emails that fail SPF or DKIM (or both), to reject such emails, or to deliver them.

It’s not trivial to configure and maintain SPF and DMARC, though. If your configuration is too strict, legitimate emails will be dropped or marked as spam. If it’s too relaxed, your domain might be misused for email spoofing. The proof is that these authentication mechanisms (SPF / DKIM / DMARC) have existed for over 10 years and still, there are still less than 6 million active DMARC records.

DMARC reports can help, and a full solution like DMARC Management reduces the burden of creating and maintaining a proper configuration.

DMARC reports

All DMARC-compliant mailbox providers support sending DMARC aggregated reports to an email address of your choice. Those reports list the services that have sent emails from your domain and the percentage of messages that passed DMARC, SPF and DKIM. They are extremely important because they give administrators the information they need to decide how to adjust their DMARC policies — for instance, that’s how administrators know if their legitimate emails are failing SPF and DKIM, or if a spammer is trying to send illegitimate emails.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

But beware, you probably don’t want to send DMARC reports to a human-monitored email address, as these come in fast and furious from virtually every email provider your organization sends messages to, and are delivered in XML format. Typically, administrators set up reports to be sent to a service like our DMARC Management, that boils them down to a more digestible form. Note: These reports do not contain personal identifiable information (PII).

DMARC Management automatically creates an email address for those reports to be sent to, and adds the corresponding RUA record to your Cloudflare DNS to announce to mailbox providers where to send reports to. And yes, if you’re curious, these email addresses are being created using Cloudflare Email Routing.

Note: Today, Cloudflare DNS is a requirement for DMARC Management. Cloudflare Area 1 customers will soon also be able to see DMARC reports even if they’re using third-party DNS services.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

As reports are received in this dedicated email address, they are processed by a Worker that extracts the relevant data, parses it and sends it over to our analytics solution. And you guessed again, that’s implemented using Email Workers. You can read more about the technical implementation here.

Taking action

Now that reports are coming in, you can review the data and take action.

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for mailbox providers to start sending reports and for these analytics to be available to you.

At the top of DMARC Management you have an at-a-glance view of the outbound security configuration for your domain, more specifically DMARC, DKIM, and SPF. DMARC Management will soon start reporting on inbound email security as well, which includes STARTTLS, MTA-STS, DANE, and TLS reporting.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

The middle section shows the email volume over time, with individual lines showing those that pass DMARC and those that fail.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

Below, you have additional details that include the number of email messages sent by each source (per the DMARC reports), and the corresponding DMARC, SPF and DKIM statistics. You can approve (that is, include in SPF) any of these sources by clicking on “…”, and you can easily spot applications that may not have DKIM correctly configured.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

Clicking on any source gives you the same DMARC, SPF and DKIM statistics per IP address of that source. This is how you identify if there’s an additional IP address you might need to include in your SPF record, for example.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

The ones that fail are the ones you’ll want to take action on, as they will need to either be approved (which technically means including in the SPF record) if legitimate, or stay unapproved and be rejected by the receiving server when the DMARC policy is configured with p=reject.

Getting to a DMARC reject policy is the goal, but you don’t want to apply such a restrictive policy until you have high confidence that all legitimate sending services are accounted for in SPF (and DKIM, if appropriate). That may take a few weeks, depending on the number of services you have sending messages from your domain, but with DMARC Management you will quickly grasp when you’re ready to go.

What else is needed

Once you have approved all your authorized email senders (sources) and configured DMARC to quarantine or reject, you should be confident that your brand and organization are much safer. From then on, keeping an eye on your approved sources list is a very lightweight operation that doesn’t take more than a few minutes per month from your team. Ideally, when new applications that send emails from your domain are deployed in your company, you would proactively include the corresponding IP addresses in your SPF record.

But even if you don’t, you will find new unapproved senders notices on your Security Center, under the Security Insights tab, alongside other important security issues you can review and manage.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

Or you can check the unapproved list on DMARC Management every few weeks.

Whenever you see a legitimate sender source show up as unapproved, you know what to do — click “…” and mark them as approved!

What’s coming next

DMARC Management takes email security to the next level, and this is only the beginning.

We’re excited to demonstrate our investments in features that provide customers even more insight into their security. Up next we’ll be connecting security analytics from Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) into the Security Center.

Stop brand impersonation with Cloudflare DMARC Management

This product integration will provide customers a way to understand the status of their wider SaaS security at a glance. By surfacing the makeup of CASB Findings (or security issues identified in popular SaaS apps) by severity, health of the SaaS integration, and the number of hidden issues, IT and security administrators will have a way to understand the status of their wider security surface area from a single source.

Stay tuned for more news on CASB in Security Center. In the meantime you can join the waitlist for DMARC Management beta for free today and, if you haven’t yet, we recommend you also check out Cloudflare Area 1 and request a Phishing Risk Assessment to block phishing, spoof and spam emails from coming into your environment.

How we built DMARC Management using Cloudflare Workers

Post Syndicated from André Cruz original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-dmarc-management/

How we built DMARC Management using Cloudflare Workers

What are DMARC reports

How we built DMARC Management using Cloudflare Workers

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It’s an email authentication protocol that helps protect against email phishing and spoofing.

When an email is sent, DMARC allows the domain owner to set up a DNS record that specifies which authentication methods, such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), are used to verify the email’s authenticity. When the email fails these authentication checks DMARC instructs the recipient’s email provider on how to handle the message, either by quarantining it or rejecting it outright.

DMARC has become increasingly important in today’s Internet, where email phishing and spoofing attacks are becoming more sophisticated and prevalent. By implementing DMARC, domain owners can protect their brand and their customers from the negative impacts of these attacks, including loss of trust, reputation damage, and financial loss.

In addition to protecting against phishing and spoofing attacks, DMARC also provides reporting capabilities. Domain owners can receive reports on email authentication activity, including which messages passed and failed DMARC checks, as well as where these messages originated from.

DMARC management involves the configuration and maintenance of DMARC policies for a domain. Effective DMARC management requires ongoing monitoring and analysis of email authentication activity, as well as the ability to make adjustments and updates to DMARC policies as needed.

Some key components of effective DMARC management include:

  • Setting up DMARC policies: This involves configuring the domain’s DMARC record to specify the appropriate authentication methods and policies for handling messages that fail authentication checks. Here’s what a DMARC DNS record looks like:

v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:[email protected]

This specifies that we are going to use DMARC version 1, our policy is to reject emails if they fail the DMARC checks, and the email address to which providers should send DMARC reports.

  • Monitoring email authentication activity: DMARC reports are an important tool for domain owners to ensure email security and deliverability, as well as compliance with industry standards and regulations. By regularly monitoring and analyzing DMARC reports, domain owners can identify email threats, optimize email campaigns, and improve overall email authentication.
  • Making adjustments as needed: Based on analysis of DMARC reports, domain owners may need to make adjustments to DMARC policies or authentication methods to ensure that email messages are properly authenticated and protected from phishing and spoofing attacks.
  • Working with email providers and third-party vendors: Effective DMARC management may require collaboration with email providers and third-party vendors to ensure that DMARC policies are being properly implemented and enforced.

Today we launched DMARC management. This is how we built it.

How we built it

As a leading provider of cloud-based security and performance solutions, we at Cloudflare take a specific approach to test our products. We “dogfood” our own tools and services, which means we use them to run our business. This helps us identify any issues or bugs before they affect our customers.

We use our own products internally, such as Cloudflare Workers, a serverless platform that allows developers to run their code on our global network. Since its launch in 2017, the Workers ecosystem has grown significantly. Today, there are thousands of developers building and deploying applications on the platform. The power of the Workers ecosystem lies in its ability to enable developers to build sophisticated applications that were previously impossible or impractical to run so close to clients. Workers can be used to build APIs, generate dynamic content, optimize images, perform real-time processing, and much more. The possibilities are virtually endless. We used Workers to power services like Radar 2.0, or software packages like Wildebeest.

Recently our Email Routing product joined forces with Workers, enabling processing incoming emails via Workers scripts. As the documentation states: “With Email Workers you can leverage the power of Cloudflare Workers to implement any logic you need to process your emails and create complex rules. These rules determine what happens when you receive an email.” Rules and verified addresses can all be configured via our API.

Here’s how a simple Email Worker looks like:

export default {
  async email(message, env, ctx) {
    const allowList = ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"];
    if (allowList.indexOf(message.headers.get("from")) == -1) {
      message.setReject("Address not allowed");
    } else {
      await message.forward("inbox@corp");
    }
  }
}

Pretty straightforward, right?

With the ability to programmatically process incoming emails in place, it seemed like the perfect way to handle incoming DMARC report emails in a scalable and efficient manner, letting Email Routing and Workers do the heavy lifting of receiving an unbound number of emails from across the globe. A high level description of what we needed is:

  1. Receive email and extract report
  2. Publish relevant details to analytics platform
  3. Store the raw report

Email Workers enable us to do #1 easily. We just need to create a worker with an email() handler. This handler will receive the SMTP envelope elements, a pre-parsed version of the email headers, and a stream to read the entire raw email.

For #2 we can also look into the Workers platform, and we will find the Workers Analytics Engine. We just need to define an appropriate schema, which depends both on what’s present in the reports and the queries we plan to do later. Afterwards we can query the data using either the GraphQL or SQL API.

For #3 we don’t need to look further than our R2 object storage. It is trivial to access R2 from a Worker. After extracting the reports from the email we will store them in R2 for posterity.

We built this as a managed service that you can enable on your zone, and added a dashboard interface for convenience, but in reality all the tools are available for you to deploy your own DMARC reports processor on top of Cloudflare Workers, in your own account, without having to worry about servers, scalability or performance.

Architecture

How we built DMARC Management using Cloudflare Workers

Email Workers is a feature of our Email Routing product. The Email Routing component runs in all our nodes, so any one of them is able to process incoming mail, which is important because we announce the Email ingress BGP prefix from all our datacenters. Sending emails to an Email Worker is as easy as setting a rule in the Email Routing dashboard.

How we built DMARC Management using Cloudflare Workers

When the Email Routing component receives an email that matches a rule to be delivered to a Worker, it will contact our internal version of the recently open-sourced workerd runtime, which also runs on all nodes. The RPC schema that governs this interaction is defined in a Capnproto schema, and allows the body of the email to be streamed to Edgeworker as it’s read. If the worker script decides to forward this email, Edgeworker will contact Email Routing using a capability sent in the original request.

jsg::Promise<void> ForwardableEmailMessage::forward(kj::String rcptTo, jsg::Optional<jsg::Ref<Headers>> maybeHeaders) {
  auto req = emailFwdr->forwardEmailRequest();
  req.setRcptTo(rcptTo);

  auto sendP = req.send().then(
      [](capnp::Response<rpc::EmailMetadata::EmailFwdr::ForwardEmailResults> res) mutable {
    auto result = res.getResponse().getResult();
    JSG_REQUIRE(result.isOk(), Error, result.getError());
  });
  auto& context = IoContext::current();
  return context.awaitIo(kj::mv(sendP));
}

In the context of DMARC reports this is how we handle the incoming emails:

  1. Fetch the recipient of the email being processed, this is the RUA that was used. RUA is a DMARC configuration parameter that indicates where aggregate DMARC processing feedback should be reported pertaining to a certain domain. This recipient can be found in the “to” attribute of the message.
const ruaID = message.to
  1. Since we handle DMARC reports for an unbounded number of domains, we use Workers KV to store some information about each one and key this information on the RUA. This also lets us know if we should be receiving these reports.
const accountInfoRaw = await env.KV_DMARC_REPORTS.get(dmarc:${ruaID})
  1. At this point, we want to read the entire email into an arrayBuffer in order to parse it. Depending on the size of the report we may run into the limits of the free Workers plan. If this happens, we recommend that you switch to the Workers Unbound resource model which does not have this issue.
const rawEmail = new Response(message.raw)
const arrayBuffer = await rawEmail.arrayBuffer()
  1. Parsing the raw email involves, among other things, parsing its MIME parts. There are multiple libraries available that allow one to do this. For example, you could use postal-mime:
const parser = new PostalMime.default()
const email = await parser.parse(arrayBuffer)
  1. Having parsed the email we now have access to its attachments. These attachments are the DMARC reports themselves and they can be compressed. The first thing we want to do is store them in their compressed form in R2 for long-term storage. They can be useful later on for re-processing or investigating interesting reports. Doing this is as simple as calling put() on the R2 binding. In order to facilitate retrieval later we recommend that you spread the report files across directories based on the current time.
await env.R2_DMARC_REPORTS.put(
    `${date.getUTCFullYear()}/${date.getUTCMonth() + 1}/${attachment.filename}`,
    attachment.content
  )
  1. We now need to look into the attachment mime type. The raw form of DMARC reports is XML, but they can be compressed. In this case we need to decompress them first. DMARC reporter files can use multiple compression algorithms. We use the MIME type to know which one to use. For Zlib compressed reports pako can be used while for ZIP compressed reports unzipit is a good choice.

  2. Having obtained the raw XML form of the report, fast-xml-parser has worked well for us in parsing them. Here’s how the DMARC report XML looks:

<feedback>
  <report_metadata>
    <org_name>example.com</org_name>
    <[email protected]</email>
   <extra_contact_info>http://example.com/dmarc/support</extra_contact_info>
    <report_id>9391651994964116463</report_id>
    <date_range>
      <begin>1335521200</begin>
      <end>1335652599</end>
    </date_range>
  </report_metadata>
  <policy_published>
    <domain>business.example</domain>
    <adkim>r</adkim>
    <aspf>r</aspf>
    <p>none</p>
    <sp>none</sp>
    <pct>100</pct>
  </policy_published>
  <record>
    <row>
      <source_ip>192.0.2.1</source_ip>
      <count>2</count>
      <policy_evaluated>
        <disposition>none</disposition>
        <dkim>fail</dkim>
        <spf>pass</spf>
      </policy_evaluated>
    </row>
    <identifiers>
      <header_from>business.example</header_from>
    </identifiers>
    <auth_results>
      <dkim>
        <domain>business.example</domain>
        <result>fail</result>
        <human_result></human_result>
      </dkim>
      <spf>
        <domain>business.example</domain>
        <result>pass</result>
      </spf>
    </auth_results>
  </record>
</feedback>
  1. We now have all the data in the report at our fingertips. What we do from here on depends a lot on how we want to present the data. For us, the goal was to display meaningful data extracted from them in our Dashboard. Therefore we needed an Analytics platform where we could push the enriched data. Enter, Workers Analytics Engine. The Analytics engine is perfect for this task since it allows us to send data to it from a worker, and exposes a GraphQL API to interact with the data afterwards. This is how we obtain the data to show in our dashboard.

In the future, we are also considering integrating Queues in the workflow to asynchronously process the report and avoid waiting for the client to complete it.

We managed to implement this project end-to-end relying only on the Workers infrastructure, proving that it’s possible, and advantageous, to build non-trivial apps without having to worry about scalability, performance, storage and security issues.

Open sourcing

As we mentioned before, we built a managed service that you can enable and use, and we will manage it for you. But, everything we did can also be deployed by you, in your account, so that you can manage your own DMARC reports. It’s easy, and free. To help you with that, we are releasing an open-source version of a Worker that processes DMARC reports in the way described above: https://github.com/cloudflare/dmarc-email-worker

If you don’t have a dashboard where to show the data, you can also query the Analytics Engine from a Worker. Or, if you want to store them in a relational database, then there’s D1 to the rescue. The possibilities are endless and we are excited to find out what you’ll build with these tools.

Please contribute, make your own, we’ll be listening.

Final words

We hope that this post has furthered your understanding of the Workers platform. Today Cloudflare takes advantage of this platform to build most of our services, and we think you should too.

Feel free to contribute to our open-source version and show us what you can do with it.

The Email Routing is also working on expanding the Email Workers API more functionally, but that deserves another blog soon.

Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks

Post Syndicated from Ayush Kumar original https://blog.cloudflare.com/knowbe4-emailsecurity-integration/

Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks

Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks

Today, we are very excited to announce that Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution, Area 1, now integrates with KnowBe4, a leading security awareness training and simulated phishing platform. This integration allows mutual customers to offer real-time coaching to their employees when a phishing campaign is detected by Cloudflare’s email security solution.

We are all aware that phishing attacks often use email as a vector to deliver the fraudulent message. Cybercriminals use a range of tactics, such as posing as a trustworthy organization, using urgent or threatening language, or creating a sense of urgency to entice the recipient to click on a link or download an attachment.

Despite the increasing sophistication of these attacks and the solutions to stop them, human error remains the weakest link in this chain of events. This is because humans can be easily manipulated or deceived, especially when they are distracted or rushed. For example, an employee might accidentally click on a link in an email that looks legitimate but is actually a phishing attempt, or they might enter their password into a fake login page without realizing it. According to the 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, phishing was the most common form of social engineering attack, accounting for 36% of all breaches. The report also noted that 85% of all breaches involved a human element, such as human error or social engineering.

Therefore, it is essential to educate and train individuals on how to recognize and avoid phishing attacks. This includes raising awareness of common phishing tactics and training individuals to scrutinize emails carefully before clicking on any links or downloading attachments.

Area1 integrates with KnowBe4

Our integration allows for the seamless integration of Cloudflare’s advanced email security capabilities with KnowBe4’s Security Awareness Training platform, KSMAT, and its real-time coaching product, SecurityCoach. This means that organizations using both products can now benefit from an added layer of security that detects and prevents email-based threats in real-time while also training employees to recognize and avoid such threats.

Organizations can offer real-time security coaching to their employees whenever our email security solution detects four types of events: malicious attachments, malicious links, spoofed emails, and suspicious emails. IT or security professionals can configure their real-time coaching campaigns to immediately deliver relevant training to their users related to a detected event.

“KnowBe4 is proud to partner with Cloudflare to provide a seamless integration with our new SecurityCoach product, which aims to deliver real-time security coaching and advice to help end users enhance their cybersecurity knowledge and strengthen their role in contributing to a strong security culture. KnowBe4 is actively working with Cloudflare to provide an API-based integration to connect our platform with systems that IT/security professionals already utilize, making rolling out new products to their teams an easy and unified process.”
Stu Sjouwerman, CEO, KnowBe4

By using the integration, organizations can ensure that their employees are not only protected by advanced security technology that detects and blocks malicious emails, but are also educated on how to identify and avoid these threats. This has been a commonly demanded feature from our customers and we have made it simple for them to implement it.

How it works

Create private key and public key in the Area 1 dashboard

Before you can set up this integration in your KnowBe4 (KMSAT) console, you will need to create a private key and public key with Cloudflare.

  • Log in to your Cloudflare Area 1 email security console as an admin.
  • Click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the page, and then navigate to the Service Accounts tab.
Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks
  • Click + Add Service Account.
Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks
  • In the NAME field, enter a name for your new service account.
Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks
  • Click + Create Service Account.
  • In the pop-up window that opens, copy and save the private key somewhere that you can easily access. You will need this key to complete the setup process in the Set Up the Integration in your KnowBe4 (KMSAT) Console section below.
Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks

Set up the integration in your KnowBe4 (KMSAT) Console

Once you have created a private key and public key in your Cloudflare Area 1 email security console, you can set up the integration in your KMSAT console. To register Cloudflare Area 1 email security with SecurityCoach in your KMSAT console, follow the steps below:

  • Log in to your KMSAT console and navigate to SecurityCoach > Setup > Security Vendor Integrations.
  • Locate Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security and click Configure.
Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks
  • Enter the Public Key and Private Key that you saved in the ‘Create your private Key and public key’ section above.
Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks
  • Click authorize. Once you’ve successfully authorized this integration, you can manage detection rules for Cloudflare Area 1 on the ‘Detection rules subtab’ of SecurityCoach.

SecurityCoach in action

Now that the SecurityCoach is set up, users within your organization will receive messages if Area 1 finds that a malicious email was sent to them. An example one can be seen below.

Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks

This message not only alerts the user to be more scrutinous about emails they are receiving, since they now know they are being actively targeted, but also provides them with followup steps that they can take to ensure their account is as safe as possible. The image and text that shows up in the email can be configured from the KnowBe4 console giving customers full flexibility on what to communicate with their employees.

Cloudflare partners with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks

What’s next

We’ll be expanding this integration with KnowBe4 to our other Zero Trust products in the coming months. If you have any questions or feedback on this integration, please contact your account team at Cloudflare. We’re excited to continue closely working with technology partners to expand existing and create new integrations that help customers on their Zero Trust journey.

Three ways to boost your email security and brand reputation with AWS

Post Syndicated from Michael Davie original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/three-ways-to-boost-your-email-security-and-brand-reputation-with-aws/

If you own a domain that you use for email, you want to maintain the reputation and goodwill of your domain’s brand. Several industry-standard mechanisms can help prevent your domain from being used as part of a phishing attack. In this post, we’ll show you how to deploy three of these mechanisms, which visually authenticate emails sent from your domain to users and verify that emails are encrypted in transit. It can take as little as 15 minutes to deploy these mechanisms on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the result can help to provide immediate and long-term improvements to your organization’s email security.

Phishing through email remains one of the most common ways that bad actors try to compromise computer systems. Incidents of phishing and related crimes far outnumber the incidents of other categories of internet crime, according to the most recent FBI Internet Crime Report. Phishing has consistently led to large annual financial losses in the US and globally.

Overview of BIMI, MTA-STS, and TLS reporting

An earlier post has covered how you can use Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) to send emails that align with best practices, including the IETF internet standards: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC). This post will show you how to build on this foundation and configure your domains to align with additional email security standards, including the following:

  • Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) – This standard allows you to associate a logo with your email domain, which some email clients will display to users in their inbox. Visit the BIMI Group’s Where is my BIMI Logo Displayed? webpage to see how logos are displayed in the user interfaces of BIMI-supporting mailbox providers; Figure 1 shows a mock-up of a typical layout that contains a logo.
  • Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) – This standard helps ensure that email servers always use TLS encryption and certificate-based authentication when they send messages to your domain, to protect the confidentiality and integrity of email in transit.
  • SMTP TLS reporting – This reporting allows you to receive reports and monitor your domain’s TLS security posture, identify problems, and learn about attacks that might be occurring.
Figure 1: A mock-up of how BIMI enables branded logos to be displayed in email user interfaces

Figure 1: A mock-up of how BIMI enables branded logos to be displayed in email user interfaces

These three standards require your Domain Name System (DNS) to publish specific records, for example by using Amazon Route 53, that point to web pages that have additional information. You can host this information without having to maintain a web server by storing it in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and delivering it through Amazon CloudFront, secured with a certificate provisioned from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).

Note: This AWS solution works for DKIM, BIMI, and DMARC, regardless of what you use to serve the actual email for your domains, which services you use to send email, and where you host DNS. For purposes of clarity, this post assumes that you are using Route 53 for DNS. If you use a different DNS hosting provider, you will manually configure DNS records in your existing hosting provider.

Solution architecture

The architecture for this solution is depicted in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The architecture diagram showing how the solution components interact

Figure 2: The architecture diagram showing how the solution components interact

The interaction points are as follows:

  1. The web content is stored in an S3 bucket, and CloudFront has access to this bucket through an origin access identity, a mechanism of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
  2. As described in more detail in the BIMI section of this blog post, the Verified Mark Certificate is obtained from a BIMI-qualified certificate authority and stored in the S3 bucket.
  3. When an external email system receives a message claiming to be from your domain, it looks up BIMI records for your domain in DNS. As depicted in the diagram, a DNS request is sent to Route 53.
  4. To retrieve the BIMI logo image and Verified Mark Certificate, the external email system will make HTTPS requests to a URL published in the BIMI DNS record. In this solution, the URL points to the CloudFront distribution, which has a TLS certificate provisioned with ACM.

A few important warnings

Email is a complex system of interoperating technologies. It is also brittle: a typo or a missing DNS record can make the difference between whether an email is delivered or not. Pay close attention to your email server and the users of your email systems when implementing the solution in this blog post. The main indicator that something is wrong is the absence of email. Instead of seeing an error in your email server’s log, users will tell you that they’re expecting to receive an email from somewhere and it’s not arriving. Or they will tell you that they sent an email, and their recipient can’t find it.

The DNS uses a lot of caching and time-out values to improve its efficiency. That makes DNS records slow and a little unpredictable as they propagate across the internet. So keep in mind that as you monitor your systems, it can be hours or even more than a day before the DNS record changes have an effect that you can detect.

This solution uses AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) custom resources, which are supported by AWS Lambda functions that will be created as part of the deployment. These functions are configured to use CDK-selected runtimes, which will eventually pass out of support and require you to update them.

Prerequisites

You will need permission in an AWS account to create and configure the following resources:

  • An Amazon S3 bucket to store the files and access logs
  • A CloudFront distribution to publicly deliver the files from the S3 bucket
  • A TLS certificate in ACM
  • An origin access identity in IAM that CloudFront will use to access files in Amazon S3
  • Lambda functions, IAM roles, and IAM policies created by CDK custom resources

You might also want to enable these optional services:

  • Amazon Route 53 for setting the necessary DNS records. If your domain is hosted by another DNS provider, you will set these DNS records manually.
  • Amazon SES or an Amazon WorkMail organization with a single mailbox. You can configure either service with a subdomain (for example, [email protected]) such that the existing domain is not disrupted, or you can create new email addresses by using your existing email mailbox provider.

BIMI has some additional requirements:

  • BIMI requires an email domain to have implemented a strong DMARC policy so that recipients can be confident in the authenticity of the branded logos. Your email domain must have a DMARC policy of p=quarantine or p=reject. Additionally, the domain’s policy cannot have sp=none or pct<100.

    Note: Do not adjust the DMARC policy of your domain without careful testing, because this can disrupt mail delivery.

  • You must have your brand’s logo in Scaled Vector Graphics (SVG) format that conforms to the BIMI standard. For more information, see Creating BIMI SVG Logo Files on the BIMI Group website.
  • Purchase a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) issued by a third-party certificate authority. This certificate attests that the logo, organization, and domain are associated with each other, based on a legal trademark registration. Many email hosting providers require this additional certificate before they will show your branded logo to their users. Others do not currently support BIMI, and others might have alternative mechanisms to determine whether to show your logo. For more information about purchasing a Verified Mark Certificate, see the BIMI Group website.

    Note: If you are not ready to purchase a VMC, you can deploy this solution and validate that BIMI is correctly configured for your domain, but your branded logo will not display to recipients at major email providers.

What gets deployed in this solution?

This solution deploys the DNS records and supporting files that are required to implement BIMI, MTA-STS, and SMTP TLS reporting for an email domain. We’ll look at the deployment in more detail in the following sections.

BIMI

BIMI is described by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as follows:

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) permits Domain Owners to coordinate with Mail User Agents (MUAs) to display brand-specific Indicators next to properly authenticated messages. There are two aspects of BIMI coordination: a scalable mechanism for Domain Owners to publish their desired Indicators, and a mechanism for Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) to verify the authenticity of the Indicator. This document specifies how Domain Owners communicate their desired Indicators through the BIMI Assertion Record in DNS and how that record is to be interpreted by MTAs and MUAs. MUAs and mail-receiving organizations are free to define their own policies for making use of BIMI data and for Indicator display as they see fit.

If your organization has a trademark-protected logo, you can set up BIMI to have that logo displayed to recipients in their email inboxes. This can have a positive impact on your brand and indicates to end users that your email is more trustworthy. The BIMI Group shows examples of how brand logos are displayed in user inboxes, as well as a list of known email service providers that support the display of BIMI logos.

As a domain owner, you can implement BIMI by publishing the relevant DNS records and hosting the relevant files. To have your logo displayed by most email hosting providers, you will need to purchase a Verified Mark Certificate from a BIMI-qualified certificate authority.

This solution will deploy a valid BIMI record in Route 53 (or tell you what to publish in the DNS if you’re not using Route 53) and will store your provided SVG logo and Verified Mark Certificate files in Amazon S3, to be delivered through CloudFront with a valid TLS certificate from ACM.

To support BIMI, the solution makes the following changes to your resources:

  1. A DNS record of type TXT is published at the following host:
    default._bimi.<your-domain>. The value of this record is: v=BIMI1; l=<url-of-your-logo> a=<url-of-verified-mark-certificate>. The value of <your-domain> refers to the domain that is used in the From header of messages that your organization sends.
  2. The logo and optional Verified Mark Certificate are hosted publicly at the HTTPS locations defined by <url-of-your-logo> and <url-of-verified-mark-certificate>, respectively.

MTA-STS

MTA-STS is described by the IETF in RFC 8461 as follows:

SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) is a mechanism enabling mail service providers to declare their ability to receive Transport Layer Security (TLS) secure SMTP connections and to specify whether sending SMTP servers should refuse to deliver to MX hosts that do not offer TLS with a trusted server certificate.

Put simply, MTA-STS helps ensure that email servers always use encryption and certificate-based authentication when sending email to your domains, so that message integrity and confidentiality are preserved while in transit across the internet. MTA-STS also helps to ensure that messages are only sent to authorized servers.

This solution will deploy a valid MTA-STS policy record in Route 53 (or tell you what value to publish in the DNS if you’re not using Route 53) and will create an MTA-STS policy document to be hosted on S3 and delivered through CloudFront with a valid TLS certificate from ACM.

To support MTA-STS, the solution makes the following changes to your resources:

  1. A DNS record of type TXT is published at the following host: _mta-sts.<your-domain>. The value of this record is: v=STSv1; id=<unique value used for cache invalidation>.
  2. The MTA-STS policy document is hosted at and obtained from the following location: https://mta-sts.<your-domain>/.well-known/mta-sts.txt.
  3. The value of <your-domain> in both cases is the domain that is used for routing inbound mail to your organization and is typically the same domain that is used in the From header of messages that your organization sends externally. Depending on the complexity of your organization, you might receive inbound mail for multiple domains, and you might choose to publish MTA-STS policies for each domain.

Is it ever bad to encrypt everything?

In the example MTA-STS policy file provided in the GitHub repository and explained later in this post, the MTA-STS policy mode is set to testing. This means that your email server is advertising its willingness to negotiate encrypted email connections, but it does not require TLS. Servers that want to send mail to you are allowed to connect and deliver mail even if there are problems in the TLS connection, as long as you’re in testing mode. You should expect reports when servers try to connect through TLS to your mail server and fail to do so.

Be fully prepared before you change the MTA-STS policy to enforce. After this policy is set to enforce, servers that follow the MTA-STS policy and that experience an enforceable TLS-related error when they try to connect to your mail server will not deliver mail to your mail server. This is a difficult situation to detect. You will simply stop receiving email from servers that comply with the policy. You might receive reports from them indicating what errors they encountered, but it is not guaranteed. Be sure that the email address you provide in SMTP TLS reporting (in the following section) is functional and monitored by people who can take action to fix issues. If you miss TLS failure reports, you probably won’t receive email. If the TLS certificate that you use on your email server expires, and your MTA-STS policy is set to enforce, this will become an urgent issue and will disrupt the flow of email until it is fixed.

SMTP TLS reporting

SMTP TLS reporting is described by the IETF in RFC 8460 as follows:

A number of protocols exist for establishing encrypted channels between SMTP Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs), including STARTTLS, DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) TLSA, and MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS). These protocols can fail due to misconfiguration or active attack, leading to undelivered messages or delivery over unencrypted or unauthenticated channels. This document describes a reporting mechanism and format by which sending systems can share statistics and specific information about potential failures with recipient domains. Recipient domains can then use this information to both detect potential attacks and diagnose unintentional misconfigurations.

As you gain the security benefits of MTA-STS, SMTP TLS reporting will allow you to receive reports from other internet email providers. These reports contain information that is valuable when monitoring your TLS security posture, identifying problems, and learning about attacks that might be occurring.

This solution will deploy a valid SMTP TLS reporting record on Route 53 (or provide you with the value to publish in the DNS if you are not using Route 53).

To support SMTP TLS reporting, the solution makes the following changes to your resources:

  1. A DNS record of type TXT is published at the following host: _smtp._tls.<your-domain>. The value of this record is: v=TLSRPTv1; rua=mailto:<report-receiver-email-address>
  2. The value of <report-receiver-email-address> might be an address in your domain or in a third-party provider. Automated systems that process these reports must be capable of processing GZIP compressed files and parsing JSON.

Deploy the solution with the AWS CDK

In this section, you’ll learn how to deploy the solution to create the previously described AWS resources in your account.

  1. Clone the following GitHub repository:

    git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/serverless-mail
    cd serverless-mail/email-security-records

  2. Edit CONFIG.py to reflect your desired settings, as follows:
    1. If no Verified Mark Certificate is provided, set VMC_FILENAME = None.
    2. If your DNS zone is not hosted on Route 53, or if you do not want this app to manage Route 53 DNS records, set ROUTE_53_HOSTED = False. In this case, you will need to set TLS_CERTIFICATE_ARN to the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of a certificate hosted on ACM in us-east-1. This certificate is used by CloudFront and must support two subdomains: mta-sts and your configured BIMI_ASSET_SUBDOMAIN.
  3. Finalize the preparation, as follows:
    1. Place your BIMI logo and Verified Mark Certificate files in the assets folder.
    2. Create an MTA-STS policy file at assets/.well-known/mta-sts.txt to reflect your mail exchange (MX) servers and policy requirements. An example file is provided at assets/.well-known/mta-sts.txt.example
  4. Deploy the solution, as follows:
    1. Open a terminal in the email-security-records folder.
    2. (Recommended) Create and activate a virtual environment by running the following commands.
      python3 -m venv .venv
      source .venv/bin/activate
    3. Install the Python requirements in your environment with the following command.
      pip install -r requirements.txt
    4. Assume a role in the target account that has the permissions outlined in the Prerequisites section of this post.

      Using AWS CDK version 2.17.0 or later, deploy the bootstrap in the target account by running the following command. To learn more, see Bootstrapping in the AWS CDK Developer Guide.
      cdk bootstrap

    5. Run the following command to synthesize the CloudFormation template. Review the output of this command to verify what will be deployed.
      cdk synth
    6. Run the following command to deploy the CloudFormation template. You will be prompted to accept the IAM changes that will be applied to your account.
      cdk deploy

      Note: If you use Route53, these records are created and activated in your DNS zones as soon as the CDK finishes deploying. As the records propagate through the DNS, they will gradually start affecting the email in the affected domains.

    7. If you’re not using Route53 and instead are using a third-party DNS provider, create the CNAME and TXT records as indicated. In this case, your email is not affected by this solution until you create the records in DNS.

Testing and troubleshooting

After you have deployed the CDK solution, you can test it to confirm that the DNS records and web resources are published correctly.

BIMI

  1. Query the BIMI DNS TXT record for your domain by using the dig or nslookup command in your terminal.

    dig +short TXT default._bimi.<your-domain.example>

    Verify the response. For example:

    "v=BIMI1; l=https://bimi-assets.<your-domain.example>/logo.svg"

  2. In your web browser, open the URL from that response (for example, https://bimi-assets.<your-domain.example>/logo.svg) to verify that the logo is available and that the HTTPS certificate is valid.
  3. The BIMI group provides a tool to validate your BIMI configuration. This tool will also validate your VMC if you have purchased one.

MTA-STS

  1. Query the MTA-STS DNS TXT record for your domain.

    dig +short TXT _mta-sts.<your-domain.example>

    The value of this record is as follows:

    v=STSv1; id=<unique value used for cache invalidation>

  2. You can load the MTA-STS policy document using your web browser. For example, https://mta-sts.<your-domain.example>/.well-known/mta-sts.txt
  3. You can also use third party tools to examine your MTA-STS configuration, such as MX Toolbox.

TLS reporting

  1. Query the TLS reporting DNS TXT record for your domain.

    dig +short TXT _smtp._tls.<your-domain.example>

    Verify the response. For example:

    "v=TLSRPTv1; rua=mailto:<your email address>"

  2. You can also use third party tools to examine your TLS reporting configuration, such as Easy DMARC.

Depending on which domains you communicate with on the internet, you will begin to see TLS reports arriving at the email address that you have defined in the TLS reporting DNS record. We recommend that you closely examine the TLS reports, and use automated analytical techniques over an extended period of time before changing the default testing value of your domain’s MTA-STS policy. Not every email provider will send TLS reports, but examining the reports in aggregate will give you a good perspective for making changes to your MTA-STS policy.

Cleanup

To remove the resources created by this solution:

  1. Open a terminal in the cdk-email-security-records folder.
  2. Assume a role in the target account with permission to delete resources.
  3. Run cdk destroy.

Note: The asset and log buckets are automatically emptied and deleted by the cdk destroy command.

Conclusion

When external systems send email to or receive email from your domains they will now query your new DNS records and will look up your domain’s BIMI, MTA-STS, and TLS reporting information from your new CloudFront distribution. By adopting the email domain security mechanisms outlined in this post, you can improve the overall security posture of your email environment, as well as the perception of your brand.

 
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

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Michael Davie

Michael Davie

Michael is a Senior Industry Specialist with AWS Security Assurance. He works with our customers, their regulators, and AWS teams to help raise the bar on secure cloud adoption and usage. Michael has over 20 years of experience working in the defence, intelligence, and technology sectors in Canada and is a licensed professional engineer.

Jesse Thompson

Jesse Thompson

Jesse is an Email Deliverability Manager with the Amazon Simple Email Service team. His background is in enterprise IT development and operations, with a focus on email abuse mitigation and encouragement of authenticity practices with open standard protocols. Jesse’s favorite activity outside of technology is recreational curling.

Expanding Area 1 email security to the Athenian Project

Post Syndicated from Jocelyn Woolbright original https://blog.cloudflare.com/expanding-area-1-email-security-to-the-athenian-project/

Expanding Area 1 email security to the Athenian Project

This post is also available in 简体中文, Deutsch, Français and Español.

Expanding Area 1 email security to the Athenian Project

Election security encompasses a wide variety of measures, including the protection of voting machines, election office networks, voter registration databases, and other systems that manage the electoral process. At Cloudflare, we have reported on threats to state and local governments under the Athenian Project, how we prepare political campaigns and state parties under Cloudflare for Campaigns for election season, and our work with organizations that report on election results and voting rights groups under Project Galileo.

Since the 2022 US midterm elections, we have been thinking about how we help state and local governments deflect larger cyber threats that target the election community and have been analyzing the biggest problems they are facing. In October 2022, Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said, “The current election threat environment is more complex than it has ever been.” Amid threats, intimidation toward election workers, and cyber attacks against election infrastructure and operations, preparing for elections is no easy task.

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. The Internet plays a key role in promoting democracy and ensuring constituents’ access to information. With this, we are excited to share that we have grown our offering under the Athenian Project to include Cloudflare’s Area 1 email security suite to help state and local governments protect against a broad spectrum of phishing attacks to keep voter data safe and secure.

Our work in protecting elections

To understand why we have expanded our product set, we need to look back on how our services have helped state and local governments during election time. Under the Athenian Project, we have provided our highest level of Cloudflare services—the Enterprise plan—for free to state and governments that run elections. The idea originally was that, just like every other Internet property, election websites need to be fast, they need to be reliable, and they need to be secure. Yet, scarce budgets too often prevent governments from getting the right resources to prevent attacks and stay online.

With this, we launched the Athenian Project in 2017. It includes many of our core web services, such as DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall, SSL encryption, and more security features that focus on web applications. We have been able to provide these services to local governments in 31 states and currently protect 359 election entities in the United States.

We have expanded our product set at Cloudflare with Workers, Pages, Zero Trust, and network security solutions. With this, we wanted to understand how we can better support the election community that we work with every day on the Athenian Project.

We knew we could provide more

Internally, we brainstormed on the most pressing issues that face the election community and overall Internet ecosystem. We also asked new and existing Athenian participants on the largest pain points they have when it comes to securing their internal networks and applications. We received a range of answers, from fears of a DDoS attack on election night, to zero-day exploits, on-path attacks, and malware attacks. Many of the same themes came up, especially for small counties that run elections with a huge fear of phishing and ransomware attacks.

Despite email’s importance as a communication method, many types of email security still are not built into email by default. As a result, email is a major attack vector for organizations large and small, and for individual people as well. We have seen firsthand phishing attempts that take advantage of human psychology to encourage quick —and unfortunate— decision-making. Once an attacker has infiltrated a network, they can easily move laterally undetected and impact a wide range of sensitive internal systems.

That is why email security plays a critical role in preemptive defenses against ransomware attacks. Since many of these attacks start with a malicious or phishing email, effective email security can act as a frontline defense against ransomware, and stop these attacks before they reach inboxes. Due to the ease with which threats can be blocked before they reach an election official’s inbox, we were excited to work with those in the election space to find the best way to make these products available.

Typically, when we offer new security products under our Impact projects, we collaborate with external stakeholders. One example is the civil society groups that we partner with under Project Galileo; many of them work in the election community and at government agencies, such as CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC). These partnerships help us understand how to provide these security tools in a responsible and sustainable way.

How one North Carolina county uses Area 1 email security

Months before the 2022 US midterm elections, we reached out to a few state and local governments that currently use Zero Trust products, such as Access and Gateway, to discuss email security.

Expanding Area 1 email security to the Athenian Project

One of our Athenian participants that was eager to work with us on this expansion was Rowan County, North Carolina. For Randy Cress, CIO for Rowan County, election season means all hands on deck for IT staff in order to secure their .gov site that provides accurate, secure information to voters.

In 2020, Rowan County reported that Cloudflare helped them tackle a 400% increase in traffic on a limited budget which allowed them to refocus resources on other county initiatives. When it comes to phishing attacks, Randy wanted to shield county employees from phishing attacks and block malicious threats automatically.

Prior to Area 1 Security, we were using Office 365 email protection with limited insight for the specifics for messages that were quarantined. While cloud services from Microsoft are continually evolving, we were looking to reduce complexity to support security functions within our environment, allowing us to continue implementing new layers of defense.

Deploying Area 1 gave the county the ability to preemptively discover and eliminate phishing attacks before they inflict damage in their environment. Randy added, “Our team was able to fully onboard prior to the official onboarding call in less than 30 minutes with Cloudflare. We were able to focus on features and specifics of the product offering in lieu of time spent in configuration mode and troubleshooting. Since we are using Cloudflare for DNS and DDoS protection, the changes were extremely easy and there were no interruptions to our mail delivery process.”

For the 2022 US midterm elections, Randy reported, “Leading up to the elections, reports within our Area 1 dashboard indicated 2x as many inbound malicious emails from the same time period in October 2022. We saw credential harvesting as the top threat, and we are easily able to see which users are targeted for email compromise. With Area 1 Security under the Athenian Project, we were able to add additional layers of security to our organization, as it allowed us to preemptively defend against malicious messages before an employee can click on a malicious link. This gives us comfort knowing that Cloudflare is our first line of defense, so we can focus on providing a secure voting process for the constituents of Rowan County.”

Area 1 and the Athenian Project

Cloudflare Area 1 email security is a cloud-native service that stops phishing attacks and can be used with Enterprise accounts under the Athenian Project. If you are a state or local government that is interested in learning more about the Athenian Project, please apply on our website: https://www.cloudflare.com/athenian/.

How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy

Post Syndicated from Ayush Kumar original https://blog.cloudflare.com/securing-the-inboxes-of-democracy/

How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy

How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy

We at Cloudflare believe that every candidate, no matter their political affiliation, should be able to operate their campaign without having to worry about the risk of cyberattacks. Malicious attackers such as nation-state threat actors, those seeking monetary reward, or those with too much time on their hands often disagree with our mission and aim to wreak havoc on the democratic process.

Protecting Email Inboxes Is Key In Stopping Attacks

In the past years, malicious actors have used email as their primary threat vector when trying to disrupt election campaigns. A quick search online shows how active attackers still are in trying to compromise election official’s email inboxes.1 Over 90% of damages done to any organization are caused by a phishing attack, making protecting email inboxes a key focus. A well crafted phishing email paired, or an errant click could give an attacker the opportunity to see sensitive information, disseminate false information to voters, or steal campaign donations.

For the United States 2022 midterm elections, Cloudflare protected the inboxes of over 100 campaigns, election officials and public organizations supporting elections. These campaigns ranged from new officials seeking spots in their local elections to incumbents in the national government. In the three months leading up to the recent elections, Cloudflare processed over 20 million emails and stopped around 150K phishing attacks from making their way into campaign officials’ email inboxes.

Political Campaigns Are Attacked Consistently

Some campaigns were targeted more than others. For example, the campaign of a specific incumbent seeking re-election in the US Senate saw their staff members receiving over 35 malicious emails on average every day. And attackers were not just phishing for credentials but also trying to impersonate officials. We saw over 10 thousand emails sent in the three-month span that were using the names of those running for office without their permission.

Below are the metrics we saw from a senator’s campaign who attackers frequently tried to phish.

How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy

A candidate for the US House of Representatives saw their staff members receive an email with the subject “Staff Payroll Review” that asked them to access a document link.

Looking at the email, it would be tough to distinguish it from a valid internal email. It contained a valid email footer and branding that is consistent with the campaign. However, Area 1 models found several discrepancies within the metadata of the email and marked it as malicious.

Our models found that the domain sending these emails was suspicious based on how similar it was to the representative’s actual campaign email. We refer to this as domain proximity. Also analyzing the link found in the email found that it was recently registered, further adding suspicion to the validity of the email.

Taking in all the data points, Area 1 made sure that the email never made it to any campaign staff’s mailbox and prevented the loss of data and money.

How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy

Another common attack campaigns see is the use of malicious attachments. These attachments can range from containing ransomware to data uploaders. The goal is to either slow down the politician’s campaign or exfiltrate sensitive information.

Attackers will use misdirection by either changing the extension of the attached file or by mentioning in the body of the email that the attachment is something more innocuous. We saw this in action for another campaign where a staffer was sent a targeted email asking them to download a purchase order.

Someone who processes hundreds of purchase orders a day does not have the time to thoroughly scrutinize every email and instead will focus on getting the money paid, so operations are not halted. Area 1’s models saved the staffer time and assessed this email to be malicious.

Our models first noticed that the attachment was a 7-Zip file called PO567.7z. Most purchase orders are sent via PDF so seeing it being sent as a 7z compressed file was concerning. Another data point the models assessed as being anomalous was the poor sentiment. The email not only has a glaring  grammatical mistake (i.e. “Dear Info,”) but also had poor message tone since it lacked common information found in legitimate purchase order emails.

How Cloudflare helps secure the inboxes of democracy

All these signals, combined with the fact that this is the first time the recipient has ever received communications from the sender, triggered Area 1 to stop the email from making it into any mailbox.

These examples speak about the trust that campaigns place in Cloudflare. Our ability to scan millions of emails and prevent dangerous ones from making it into mailboxes while allowing safe ones to reach their intended recipients with no interruptions is why so many campaigns chose Cloudflare’s Area 1 product to secure their mailboxes and by extension secure our democratic institutions.

Cloudflare’s Area 1 Solution

All this is possible because of Area 1’s preemptive campaign discovery and machine learning algorithms which analyze various threat signals, from email attachments, to the sender’s domain, to sentiment within the email itself in order to assess whether an email is malicious or not.

We also made Area 1 easily deployable, ensuring that campaigns are protected right away rather than having to spend time configuring hardware, agents, or appliances. Cloudflare also knows that election campaigns struggle to apply the appropriate email hygiene and authentication controls, stipulated by industry standards (such as SPF / DKIM / DMARC).

These can be complex and take time to implement. The rapid cycle of new campaigns makes it harder to set up the right email authentication controls that conform with industry best practices. Given that, it is all the more vital to ensure there are strong inbound technical controls against phishing and email-based attacks; letting campaigns focus on what’s most important – spreading their message to their constituents in the most effective & secure manner possible.
We know that those who seek to become political leaders have a target on their backs from attackers looking to disrupt the democratic process.

At Cloudflare, we believe in creating a better Internet and that means ensuring that inboxes remain secure. If you would like to learn more about how Area 1 works and other ways we protect email inboxes, please check out the Area 1 product page here.


1) https://www.cbsnews.com/feature/election-hacking/

Cloudflare Area 1 – how the best Email Security keeps getting better

Post Syndicated from Joao Sousa Botto original https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-security/

Cloudflare Area 1 - how the best Email Security keeps getting better

Cloudflare Area 1 - how the best Email Security keeps getting better

On February 23, 2022, after being a customer for two years and seeing phishing attacks virtually disappear from our employee’s mailboxes, Cloudflare announced the acquisition of Area 1 Security.

Thanks to its unique technology (more on that below) Cloudflare Area 1 can proactively identify and protect against phishing campaigns before they happen, and potentially prevent the 90%+ of all cyberattacks that Deloitte research identified as starting with an email. All with little to no impact on employee productivity.

But preventing 90% of the attacks is not enough, and that’s why Cloudflare Area 1 email security is part of our Zero Trust platform. Here’s what’s new.

Email Security on your Cloudflare Dashboard

Starting today you will find a dedicated Email Security section on your Cloudflare dashboard. That’s the easiest way for any Cloudflare customer to get familiar with and start using Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security.

From there you can easily request a trial, which gives you access to the full product for 30 days.

Our team will guide you through the setup, which will take just a few minutes. That’s the beauty of not having to install and tune a Secure Email Gateway (SEG). You can simply configure Area 1 inline or connect through the API, journaling, or other connectors – none of these options disrupt mail flow or the end user experience. And you don’t need any new hardware, appliances or agents.

Once the trial starts, you’ll be able to review detection metrics and forensics in real time, and will receive real-time updates from the Area 1 team on incidents that require immediate attention.

At the end of the trial you will also have a Phishing Risk Assessment where our team will walk you through the impact of the mitigated attacks and answer your questions.

Cloudflare Area 1 - how the best Email Security keeps getting better

Another option you’ll see on the Email Security section of the Cloudflare Dashboard is to explore the Area 1 demo.

At the click of a button you’ll enter the Area 1 portal of a fictitious company where you can see the product in action. You can interact with the full product, including our advanced message classifiers, the BEC protections, real time view of spoofed domains, and our unique message search and trace capabilities.

Cloudflare Area 1 - how the best Email Security keeps getting better

Product Expansions

Being cloud-native has allowed us to develop some unique capabilities. Most notably, we scan the Internet for attacker infrastructure, sources and delivery mechanisms to stop phishing attacks days before they hit an inbox. These are state of the art machine-learning models using the threat intelligence data that Area 1 has accumulated since it was founded nine years ago, and now they also incorporate data from the 124 billion cyber threats that Cloudflare blocks each day and its 1.7 trillion daily DNS queries.

Since the product is cloud-based and no local appliances are involved, these unique datasets and models benefit every customer immediately and apply to the full range of email attack types (URLs, payloads, BEC), vectors (email, web, network), and attack channels (external, internal, trusted partners). Additionally, the threat datasets, observables and Indicators of Compromise (IOC) are now additional signals to Cloudflare Gateway (part of Zero Trust), extending protection beyond email and giving Cloudflare customers the industry’s utmost protection against converged or blended threats.

The expertise Area 1 gained through this relentless focus on Threat Research and Threat Operations (i.e., disrupting actors once identified) is also leading to a new large scale initiative to make every Cloudflare customer, and the broader Internet, safer – Cloudforce One.

The Cloudforce One team is composed of analysts assigned to five subteams: Malware Analysis, Threat Analysis, Active Mitigation and Countermeasures, Intelligence Analysis, and Intelligence Sharing. Collectively, they have tracked many of the most sophisticated cyber criminals on the Internet while at the National Security Agency (NSA), USCYBERCOM, and Area 1 Security, and have worked closely with similar organizations and governments to disrupt these threat actors. They’ve also been prolific in publishing “finished intel” reports on security topics of significant geopolitical importance, such as targeted attacks against governments, technology companies, the energy sector, and law firms, and have regularly briefed top organizations around the world on their efforts.

The team will help protect all Cloudflare customers by working closely with our existing product, engineering, and security teams to improve our products based on tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed in the wild. Customers will get better protection without having to take any action.

Additionally, customers can purchase a subscription to Cloudforce One (now generally available), and get access to threat data and briefings, dedicated security tools, and the ability to make requests for information (RFIs) to the team’s threat operations staff. RFIs can be on any security topic of interest, and will be analyzed and responded to in a timely manner. For example, the Cloudforce One Malware Analysis team can accept uploads of possible malware and provide a technical analysis of the submitted resource.

Lastly, SPF/DKIM/DMARC policies are another tool that can be used to prevent Email Spoofing and have always been a critical part of Area 1’s threat models. Cloudflare Area 1 customers receive weekly DMARC sender reports to understand the efficacy of their configuration, but customers have also asked for help in setting up SPF/DKIM/DMARC records for their own domains.

It was only logical to make Cloudflare’s Email Security DNS Wizard part of our Email Security stack to guide customers through their initial SPF, DKIM and DMARC configuration. The wizard is now available to all customers using Cloudflare DNS, and will soon be available to Cloudflare Area 1 customers using a third party DNS. Getting SPF/DKIM/DMARC right can be complex, but it is a necessary and vital part of making the Internet safer, and this solution will help you build a solid foundation.

You’ll be hearing from us very soon regarding more expansions to the Area 1 feature set. In the meantime, if you want to experience Area 1 first-hand sign up for a Phishing Risk Assessment here or explore the interactive demo through the Email section of your Cloudflare Dashboard.

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Post Syndicated from Jesse Kipp original https://blog.cloudflare.com/phishing-threat-indicators-in-zero-trust/

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Over the last several years, both Area 1 and Cloudflare built pipelines for ingesting threat indicator data, for use within our products. During the acquisition process we compared notes, and we discovered that the overlap of indicators between our two respective systems was smaller than we expected. This presented us with an opportunity: as one of our first tasks in bringing the two companies together, we have started bringing Area 1’s threat indicator data into the Cloudflare suite of products. This means that all the products today that use indicator data from Cloudflare’s own pipeline now get the benefit of Area 1’s data, too.

Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust

Area 1 built a data pipeline focused on identifying new and active phishing threats, which now supplements the Phishing category available today in Gateway. If you have a policy that references this category, you’re already benefiting from this additional threat coverage.

How Cloudflare identifies potential phishing threats

Cloudflare is able to combine the data, procedures and techniques developed independently by both the Cloudflare team and the Area 1 team prior to acquisition. Customers are able to benefit from the work of both teams across the suite of Cloudflare products.

Cloudflare curates a set of data feeds both from our own network traffic, OSINT sources, and numerous partnerships, and applies custom false positive control. Customers who rely on Cloudflare are spared the software development effort as well as the operational workload to distribute and update these feeds. Cloudflare handles this automatically, with updates happening as often as every minute.

Cloudflare is able to go beyond this and work to proactively identify phishing infrastructure in multiple ways. With the Area 1 acquisition, Cloudflare is now able to apply the adversary-focused threat research approach of Area1 across our network. A team of threat researchers track state-sponsored and financially motivated threat actors, newly disclosed CVEs, and current phishing trends.

Cloudflare now operates mail exchange servers for hundreds of organizations around the world, in addition to its DNS resolvers, Zero Trust suite, and network services. Each of these products generates data that is used to enhance the security of all of Cloudflare’s products. For example, as part of mail delivery, the mail engine performs domain lookups, scores potential phishing indicators via machine learning, and fetches URLs. Data which can now be used through Cloudflare’s offerings.

How Cloudflare Area 1 identifies potential phishing threats

The Cloudflare Area 1 team operates a suite of web crawling tools designed to identify phishing pages, capture phishing kits, and highlight attacker infrastructure. In addition, Cloudflare Area 1 threat models assess campaigns based on signals gathered from threat actor campaigns; and the associated IOCs of these campaign messages are further used to enrich Cloudflare Area 1 threat data for future campaign discovery. Together these techniques give Cloudflare Area 1 a leg up on identifying the indicators of compromise for an attacker prior to their attacks against our customers. As part of this proactive approach, Cloudflare Area 1 also houses a team of threat researchers that track state-sponsored and financially motivated threat actors, newly disclosed CVEs, and current phishing trends. Through this research, analysts regularly insert phishing indicators into an extensive indicator management system that may be used for our email product or any other product that may query it.

Cloudflare Area 1 also collects information about phishing threats during our normal operation as the mail exchange server for hundreds of organizations across the world. As part of that role, the mail engine performs domain lookups, scores potential phishing indicators via machine learning, and fetches URLs. For those emails found to be malicious, the indicators associated with the email are inserted into our indicator management system as part of a feedback loop for subsequent message evaluation.

How Cloudflare data will be used to improve phishing detection

In order to support Cloudflare products, including Gateway and Page Shield, Cloudflare has a data pipeline that ingests data from partnerships, OSINT sources, as well as threat intelligence generated in-house at Cloudflare. We are always working to curate a threat intelligence data set that is relevant to our customers and actionable in the products Cloudflare supports. This is our North star: what data can we provide that enhances our customer’s security without requiring our customers to manage the complexity of data, relationships, and configuration. We offer a variety of security threat categories, but some major focus areas include:

  • Malware distribution
  • Malware and Botnet Command & Control
  • Phishing,
  • New and newly seen domains

Phishing is a threat regardless of how the potential phishing link gets entry into an organization, whether via email, SMS, calendar invite or shared document, or other means. As such, detecting and blocking phishing domains has been an area of active development for Cloudflare’s threat data team since almost its inception.

Looking forward, we will be able to incorporate that work into Cloudflare Area 1’s phishing email detection process. Cloudflare’s list of phishing domains can help identify malicious email when those domains appear in the sender, delivery headers, message body or links of an email.

1+1 = 3: Greater dataset sharing between Cloudflare and Area 1

Threat actors have long had an unfair advantage — and that advantage is rooted in the knowledge of their target, and the time they have to set up specific campaigns against their targets. That dimension of time allows threat actors to set up the right infrastructure, perform reconnaissance, stage campaigns, perform test probes, observe their results, iterate, improve and then launch their ‘production’ campaigns. This precise element of time gives us the opportunity to discover, assess and proactively filter out campaign infrastructure prior to campaigns reaching critical mass. But to do that effectively, we need visibility and knowledge of threat activity across the public IP space.

With Cloudflare’s extensive network and global insight into the origins of DNS, email or web traffic, combined with Cloudflare Area 1’s datasets of campaign tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), seed infrastructure and threat models — we are now better positioned than ever to help organizations secure themselves against sophisticated threat actor activity, and regain the advantage that for so long has been heavily weighted towards the bad guys.

If you’d like to extend Zero Trust to your email security to block advanced threats, contact your Customer Success manager, or request a Phishing Risk Assessment here.

How to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1

Post Syndicated from Shalabh Mohan original https://blog.cloudflare.com/replace-your-email-gateway-with-area-1/

How to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1

How to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1

Leaders and practitioners responsible for email security are faced with a few truths every day. It’s likely true that their email is cloud-delivered and comes with some built-in protection that does an OK job of stopping spam and commodity malware. It’s likely true that they have spent considerable time, money, and staffing on their Secure Email Gateway (SEG) to stop phishing, malware, and other email-borne threats. Despite this, it’s also true that email continues to be the most frequent source of Internet threats, with Deloitte research finding that 91% of all cyber attacks begin with phishing.

If anti-phishing and SEG services have both been around for so long, why do so many phish still get through? If you’re sympathetic to Occam’s razor, it’s because the SEG was not designed to protect the email environments of today, nor is it effective at reliably stopping today’s phishing attacks.

But if you need a stronger case than Occam delivers — then keep on reading.

Why the world has moved past the SEG

The most prominent change within the email market is also what makes a traditional SEG redundant – the move to cloud-native email services. More than 85% of organizations are expected to embrace a “cloud-first” strategy by 2025, according to Gartner®. Organizations that expect cloud-native scale, resiliency, and flexibility from their security controls are not going to get it from legacy devices such as SEGs.

When it comes to email specifically, Gartner® notes that, “Advanced email security capabilities are increasingly being deployed as integrated cloud email security solutions rather than as a gateway” – with at least 40% of organizations using built-in protection capabilities from cloud email providers instead of a SEG, by 2023. Today, email comes from everywhere and goes everywhere – putting a SEG in front of your Exchange server is anachronistic; and putting a SEG in front of cloud inboxes in a mobile and remote-first world is intractable. Email security today should follow your user, should be close to your inbox, and should “be everywhere”.

Apart from being architecturally out of time, a SEG also falls short at detecting advanced phishing and socially engineered attacks. This is because a SEG was originally designed to stop spam – a high-volume problem that needs large attack samples to detect and nullify. But today’s phishing attacks are more sniper than scattergun. They are low volume, highly targeted, and exploit our implicit trust in email communications to steal money and data. Detecting modern phishing attacks requires compute-intensive advanced email analysis and threat detection algorithms that a SEG cannot perform at scale.

Nowhere is a SEG’s outdated detection philosophy more laid bare than when admins are confronted with a mountain of email threat policies to create and tune. Unlike most other cyber attacks, email phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) have too many “fuzzy” signals and cannot solely be detected by deterministic if-then statements. Moreover, attackers don’t stand still while you create email threat policies – they adapt fast and modify techniques to bypass the rules you just created. Relying on SEG tuning to stop phishing is like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole rigged in the attacker’s favor.

How to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1

To stop phishing, look ahead

Traditional email security defenses rely on knowledge of yesterday’s active attack characteristics, such as reputation data and threat signatures, to detect the next attack, and therefore can’t reliably defend against modern phishing attacks that continually evolve.

What’s needed is forward-looking security technology that is aware not only of yesterday’s active phishing payloads, websites, and techniques — but also has insight into the threat actors’ next moves. Which sites and accounts are they compromising or establishing for use in tomorrow’s attacks? What payloads and techniques are they preparing to use in those attacks? Where are they prodding and probing before an attack?

Cloudflare Area 1 proactively scans the Internet for attacker infrastructure and phishing campaigns that are under construction. Area 1’s threat-focused web crawlers dynamically analyze suspicious web pages and payloads, and continuously update detection models as attacker tactics evolve – all to stop phishing attacks days before they reach the inbox.

When combined with the 1T+ daily DNS requests observed by Cloudflare Gateway, this corpus of threat intelligence enables customers to stop phishing threats at the earliest stage of the attack cycle. In addition, the use of deep contextual analytics to understand message sentiment, tone, tenor and thread variations allows Area 1 to understand and distinguish between valid business process messages and sophisticated impersonation campaigns.

While we are big believers in layering security, the layers should not be redundant. A SEG duplicates a lot of capabilities that customers now get bundled in with their cloud email offering. Area 1 is built to enhance – not duplicate – native email security and stop phishing attacks that get past initial layers of defense.

How to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1

Planning for your SEG replacement project

The best way to get started with your SEG replacement project is deciding whether it’s a straight replacement or an eventual replacement that starts with augmentation. While Cloudflare Area 1 has plenty of customers that have replaced their SEG (more on that later), we have also seen scenarios where customers prefer to run Cloudflare Area 1 downstream of their SEG initially, assess the efficacy of both services, and then make a more final determination. We make the process straightforward either way!

As you start the project, it’s important to involve the right stakeholders. At a minimum, you should involve an IT admin to ensure email delivery and productivity isn’t impacted and a security admin to monitor detection efficacy. Other stakeholders might include your channel partner if that’s your preferred procurement process and someone from the privacy and compliance team to verify proper handling of data.

Next, you should decide your preferred Cloudflare Area 1 deployment architecture. Cloudflare Area 1 can be deployed as the MX record, over APIs, and can even run in multi-mode deployment. We recommend deploying Cloudflare Area 1 as the MX record for the most effective protection against external threats, but the service fits into your world based on your business logic and specific needs.

The final piece of preparation involves mapping out your email flow. If you have multiple domains, identify where emails from each of your domains route to. Check your different routing layers (e.g. are there MTAs that relay inbound messages?). Having a good understanding of the logical and physical SMTP layers within the organization will ensure proper routing of messages. Discuss what email traffic Cloudflare Area 1 should scan (north/south, east/west, both) and where it fits with your existing email policies.

Executing the transition plan

Step 1: Implement email protection
Here are the broad steps you should follow if Cloudflare Area 1 is configured as the MX record (time estimate: ~30 minutes):

  • Configure the downstream service to accept mail from Cloudflare Area 1.
  • Ensure that Cloudflare Area 1’s egress IPs are not rate limited or blocked as this would affect delivery of messages.
  • If the email server is on-premises, update firewall rules to allow Cloudflare Area 1 to deliver to these systems.
  • Configure remediation rules (e.g. quarantine, add subject or message body prefix, etc.).
  • Test the message flow by injecting messages into Cloudflare Area 1 to confirm proper delivery. (our team can assist with this step.)
  • Update MX records to point to Cloudflare Area 1.

Here are the steps if Cloudflare Area 1 is deployed downstream from an existing email security solution (time estimate: ~30 minutes):

  • Configure the proper look back hops on Cloudflare Area 1, so that Cloudflare Area 1 can detect the original sender IP address.
  • If your email server is on-premises, update firewall rules to allow Cloudflare Area 1 to deliver to the email server.
  • Configure remediation rules (e.g. quarantine, add subject or message body prefix, etc.).
  • Test the message flow by injecting messages into Cloudflare Area 1 to confirm proper delivery. (our team can assist with this step.)
  • Update the delivery routes on your SEG to deliver all mail to Cloudflare Area 1, instead of the email servers.

Step 2: Integrate DNS
One of the most common post-email steps customers follow is to integrate Cloudflare Area 1 with their DNS service. If you’re a Cloudflare Gateway customer, good news – Cloudflare Area 1 now uses Cloudflare Gateway as its recursive DNS to protect end users from accessing phishing and malicious sites through email links or web browsing.

Step 3: Integrate with downstream security monitoring and remediation services
Cloudflare Area 1’s detailed and customizable reporting allows for at-a-glance visibility into threats. By integrating with SIEMs through our robust APIs, you can easily correlate Cloudflare Area 1 detections with events from network, endpoint and other security tools for simplified incident management.

While Cloudflare Area 1 provides built-in remediation and message retraction to allow customers to respond to threats directly within the Cloudflare Area 1 dashboard, many organizations also choose to integrate with orchestration tools for custom response playbooks. Many customers leverage our API hooks to integrate with SOAR services to manage response processes across their organization.

How to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1

Metrics to measure success

How will you know your SEG replacement project has been successful and had the desired impact? We recommend measuring metrics relevant to both detection efficacy and operational simplicity.

On the detection front, the obvious metric to measure is the number and nature of phishing attacks blocked before and after the project. Are you seeing new types of phishing attacks being blocked that you weren’t seeing before? Are you getting visibility into campaigns that hit multiple mailboxes? The other detection-based metric to keep in mind is the number of false positives.

On the operational front, it’s critical that email productivity isn’t impacted. A good proxy for this is measuring the number of IT tickets related to email delivery. The availability and uptime of the email security service is another key lever to keep an eye on.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, measure how much time your security team is spending on email security. Hopefully it’s much less than before! A SEG is known to be a heavy-lift service deployment to ongoing maintenance. If Cloudflare Area 1 can free up your team’s time to work on other pressing security concerns, that’s as meaningful as stopping the phish themselves.

You have lots of company

The reason we are articulating a SEG replacement plan here is because many of our customers have done it already and are happy with the outcomes.

For example, a Fortune 50 global insurance provider that serves 90 million customers in over 60 countries found their SEG to be insufficient in stopping phishing attacks. Specifically, it was an onerous process to search for “missed phish” once they got past the SEG and reached the inbox. They needed an email security service that could catch these phishing attacks and support a hybrid architecture with both cloud and on-premises mailboxes.

After deploying Cloudflare Area 1 downstream of their Microsoft 365 and SEG layers, our customer was protected against more than 14,000 phishing threats within the first month; none of those phishing messages reached a user’s inbox. A one-step integration with existing email infrastructure meant that maintenance and operational issues were next to none. Cloudflare Area 1’s automated message retraction and post-delivery protection also enabled the insurance provider to easily search and remediate any missed phish as well.

If you are interested in speaking with any of our customers that have augmented or replaced their SEG with Cloudflare Area 1, please reach out to your account team to learn more! If you’d like to see Cloudflare Area 1 in action, sign up for a Phishing Risk Assessment here.

Replacing a SEG is a great project to fit into your overall Zero Trust roadmap. For a full summary of Cloudflare One Week and what’s new, tune in to our recap webinar.

1Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences”, 11 November 2021
2Gartner, “Market Guide for Email Security,” 7 October 2021, Mark Harris, Peter Firstbrook, Ravisha Chugh, Mario de Boer
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

Post Syndicated from Shalabh Mohan original https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-link-isolation/

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語 and Español.

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

There is an implicit and unearned trust we place in our email communications. This realization — that an organization can’t truly have a Zero Trust security posture without including email — was the driving force behind Cloudflare’s acquisition of Area 1 Security earlier this year.  Today, we have taken our first step in this exciting journey of integrating Cloudflare Area 1 email security into our broader Cloudflare One platform. Cloudflare Secure Web Gateway customers can soon enable Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) for email links, giving them an unmatched level of protection from modern multi-channel email-based attacks.

Research from Cloudflare Area 1 found that nearly 10% of all observed malicious attacks involved credential harvesters, highlighting that victim identity is what threat actors usually seek. While commodity phishing attacks are blocked by existing security controls, modern attacks and payloads don’t have a set pattern that can reliably be matched with a block or quarantine rule. Additionally, with the growth of multi-channel phishing attacks, an effective email security solution needs the ability to detect blended campaigns spanning email and Web delivery, as well as deferred campaigns that are benign at delivery time, but weaponized at click time.

When enough “fuzzy” signals exist, isolating the destination to ensure end users are secure is the most effective solution. Now, with the integration of Cloudflare Browser Isolation into Cloudflare Area 1 email security, these attacks can now be easily detected and neutralized.

Human error is human

Why do humans still click on malicious links? It’s not because they haven’t attended enough training sessions or are not conscious about security. It’s because they have 50 unread emails in their inbox, have another Zoom meeting to get to, or are balancing a four-year old on their shoulders. They are trying their best. Anyone, including security researchers, can fall for socially engineered attacks if the adversary is well-prepared.

If we accept that human error is here to stay, developing security workflows introduces new questions and goals:

  • How can we reduce, rather than eliminate, the likelihood of human error?
  • How can we reduce the impact of human error when, not if, it happens?
  • How can security be embedded into an employee’s existing daily workflows?

It’s these questions that we had in mind when we reached the conclusion that email needs to be a fundamental part of any Zero Trust platform. Humans make mistakes in email just as regularly — in fact, sometimes more so — as they make mistakes surfing the Web.

To block, or not to block?

For IT teams, that is the question they wrestle with daily to balance risk mitigation with user productivity. The SOC team wants IT to block everything risky or unknown, whereas the business unit wants IT to allow everything not explicitly bad. If IT decides to block risky or unknown links, and it results in a false positive, they waste time manually adding URLs to allow lists — and perhaps the attacker later pivots those URLs to malicious content anyway. If IT decides to allow risky or unknown sites, best case they waste time reimaging infected devices and resetting login credentials — but all too common, they triage the damage from a data breach or ransomware lockdown. The operational simplicity of enabling RBI with email — also known as email link isolation — saves the IT, SOC, and business unit teams significant time.

How it works

For a Cloudflare Area 1 customer, the initial steps involve enabling RBI within your portal:

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

With email link isolation in place, here’s the short-lived life of an email with suspicious links:

Step 1: Cloudflare Area 1 inspects the email and determines that certain links in the messages are suspicious or on the margin

Step 2: Suspicious URLs and hyperlinks in the email get rewritten to a custom Cloudflare Area 1 prefix URL.

Step 3: The email is delivered to the intended inboxes.

Step 4: If a user clicks the link in the email, Cloudflare redirects to a remote browser via <authdomain>.cloudflareaccess.com/browser/{{url}}.

Step 5: Remote browser loads a website on a server on the Cloudflare Global Network and serves draw commands to the user’s clientless browser endpoint.

By executing the browser code and controlling user interactions on a remote server rather than a user device, any and all malware and phishing attempts are isolated, and won’t infect devices and compromise user identities. This improves both user and endpoint security when there are unknown risks and unmanaged devices, and allows users to access websites without having to connect to a VPN or having strict firewall policies.

Cloudflare’s RBI technology uses a unique patented technology called Network Vector Rendering (NVR) that utilizes headless Chromium-based browsers in the cloud, transparently intercepts draw layer output, transmits the draw commands efficiency and securely over the web, and redraws them in the windows of local HTML5 browsers. Unlike legacy Browser Isolation technologies that relied on pixel pushing or DOM reconstruction, NVR is optimized for scalability, security and end user transparency, while ensuring the broadest compatibility with websites.

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

Let’s look at a specific example of a deferred phishing attack, how it slips past traditional defenses, and how email link isolation addresses the threat.

As organizations look to adopt new security principles and network architectures like Zero Trust, adversaries continually come up with techniques to bypass these controls by exploiting the most used and most vulnerable application – email. Email is a good candidate for compromise because of its ubiquity and ability to be bypassed pretty easily by a motivated attacker.

Let’s take an example of a “deferred phishing attack”, without email link isolation.

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

Attacker preparation: weeks before launch
The attacker sets up infrastructure for the phishing attempt to come. This may include:

  • Registering a domain
  • Encrypting it with SSL
  • Setting up proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
  • Creating a benign web page

At this point, there is no evidence of an attack that can be picked up by secure email gateways, authentication-based solutions, or threat intelligence that relies solely on reputation-based signals and other deterministic detection techniques.

Attack “launch”: Sunday afternoon
The attacker sends an authentic-looking email from the newly-created domain. This email includes a link to the (still benign) webpage. There’s nothing in the email to block or flag it as suspicious. The email gets delivered to intended inboxes.

Attack launch: Sunday evening
Once the attacker is sure that all emails have reached their destination, they pivot the link to a malicious destination by changing the attacker-controlled webpage, perhaps by creating a fake login page to harvest credentials.

Attack landing: Monday morning
As employees scan their inboxes to begin their week, they see the email. Maybe not all of them click the link, but some of them do. Maybe not all of those that clicked enter their credentials, but a handful do. Without email link isolation, the attack is successful.

The consequences of the attack have also just begun – once user login credentials are obtained, attackers can compromise legitimate accounts, distribute malware to your organization’s network, steal confidential information, and cause much more downstream damage.

The integration between Cloudflare Area 1 and Cloudflare Browser Isolation provides a critical layer of post-delivery protection that can foil attacks like the deferred phishing example described above.

If the attacker prepares for and executes the attack as stated in the previous section, our email link isolation would analyze the email link at the time of click and perform a high-level assessment on whether the user should be able to navigate to it.

Safe link – Users will be redirected to this site transparently

Malicious link Users are blocked from navigating

Suspicious link Users are heavily discouraged to navigating and are presented with a splash warning page encouraging them to view in the link in an isolated browser

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats
Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats

While a splash warning page was the mitigation employed in the above example, email link isolation will also offer security administrators other customizable mitigation options as well, including putting the webpage in read-only mode, restricting the download and upload of files, and disabling keyboard input altogether within their Cloudflare Gateway consoles.

Email link isolation also fits into users’ existing workflows without impacting productivity or sapping their time with IT tickets. Because Cloudflare Browser Isolation is built and deployed on the Cloudflare network, with global locations in 270 cities, web browsing sessions are served as close to users as possible, minimizing latency. Additionally, Cloudflare Browser Isolation sends the final output of each webpage to a user instead of page scrubbing or sending a pixel stream, further reducing latency and not breaking browser-based applications such as SaaS.

How do I get started?

Existing Cloudflare Area 1 and Cloudflare Gateway customers are eligible for the beta release of email link isolation. To learn more and to express interest, sign up for our upcoming beta.

If you’d like to see what threats Cloudflare Area 1 detects on your live email traffic, request a free phishing risk assessment here. It takes five minutes to get started and does not impact mail flow.

Why we are acquiring Area 1

Post Syndicated from John Graham-Cumming original https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-are-acquiring-area-1/

Why we are acquiring Area 1

This post is also available in Français and Español.

Why we are acquiring Area 1

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We’ve invested heavily in building the world’s most powerful cloud network to deliver a faster, safer and more reliable Internet for our users. Today, we’re taking a big step towards enhancing our ability to secure our customers.

Earlier today we announced that Cloudflare has agreed to acquire Area 1 Security. Area 1’s team has built exceptional cloud-native technology to protect businesses from email-based security threats. Cloudflare will integrate Area 1’s technology with our global network to give customers the most complete Zero Trust security platform available.

Why Email Security?

Back at the turn of the century I was involved in the fight against email spam. At the time, before the mass use of cloud-based email, spam was a real scourge. Clogging users’ inboxes, taking excruciatingly long to download, and running up people’s Internet bills. The fight against spam involved two things, one technical and one architectural.

Technically, we figured out how to use machine-learning to successfully differentiate between spam and genuine. And fairly quickly email migrated to being largely cloud-based. But together these changes didn’t kill spam, but they relegated to a box filled with junk that rarely needs to get looked at.

What spam didn’t do, although for a while it looked like it might, was kill email. In fact, email remains incredibly important. And because of its importance it’s a massive vector for threats against businesses and individuals.

And whilst individuals largely moved to cloud-based email many companies still have on-premise email servers. And, much like anything else in the cybersecurity world, email needs best-in-class protection, not just what’s built in with the email provider being used.

When Cloudflare was in its infancy we considered dealing with the email-borne threat problem but opted to concentrate on building defences for networks and the web. Over time, we’ve vastly expanded our protection and our customers are using us to protect the entirety of their Internet-facing world.

Whilst we can protect a mail server from DDoS, for example, using Magic Transit, that’s just one potential way in which email gets attacked. And far more insidious are emails sent into organizations containing scams, malware and other threats. Just as Cloudflare protects applications that use HTTP, we need to protect email at the application and content level.

If you read the press, few weeks go by without reading a news story about how an organization had significant data compromised because an employee fell for a phishing email.

Cyberthreats are entering businesses via email. Area 1 estimates that more than 90% of cyber security damages are the result of just one thing: phishing. Let’s be clear, email is the biggest exposure for any business.

Existing email security solutions aren’t quite cutting it. Historically, companies have addressed email threats by layering legacy box-based products. And layering they are, as around 1 in 7 Fortune 1000 companies use two or more email security solutions1. If you know Cloudflare, you know legacy boxes are not our thing. As businesses continue to move to the cloud, so does email. Gartner estimates 71% of companies use cloud or hybrid cloud email, with Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365 being the most common solutions2. While these companies offer built-in protection capabilities for their email products, many companies do not believe they adequately protect users (more on our own experience with these shortfalls later).

Why we are acquiring Area 1

Trying before buying  

Email security is something that has been on our mind for some time.

Last year we rolled out Email Security DNS Wizard, our first email security product. It was designed as a tool to tackle email spoofing and phishing and improve the deliverability of millions of emails. This was just the first step on our email security journey. Bringing Area 1 onboard is the next, and much larger, step in that journey.

As a security company, we are constantly being attacked. We have been using Area 1 for some time to protect our employees from these attackers.

In early 2020, our security team saw an uptick in employee-reported phishing attempts. Our cloud-based email provider had strong spam filtering, but fell short at blocking malicious threats and other advanced attacks. Additionally, our provider only offered controls to cover their native web application, and did not provide sufficient controls to protect their iOS app and alternate methods of accessing email. Clearly, we needed to layer an email security solution on top of their built-in protection capabilities (more on layering later…).

The team looked for four main things in a vendor: the ability to scan email attachments, the ability to analyze suspected malicious links, business email compromise protection, and strong APIs into cloud-native email providers. After testing many vendors, Area 1 became the clear choice to protect our employees. We implemented Area 1’s solution in early 2020, and the results have been fantastic. With Area 1, we’ve been able to proactively identify phishing campaigns and take action against them before they cause damage. We saw a significant and prolonged drop in phishing emails. Not only that, the Area 1 service had little to no impact on email productivity, which means there were minimal false positives distracting our security team.

In fact, Area 1’s technology was so effective at launch, that our CEO reached out to our Chief Security Officer to inquire if our email security was broken. Our CEO hadn’t seen any phishing attempts reported by our employees for many weeks, a rare occurrence. It turns out our employees weren’t reporting any phishing attempts, because Area 1 was catching all phishing attempts before they reached our employee’s inboxes.

The reason Area 1 is able to do a better job than other providers out there is twofold. First, they have built a significant data platform that is able to identify patterns in emails. Where does an email come from? What does it look like? What IP does it come from? Area 1 has been in the email security space for nine years, and they have amassed an incredibly valuable trove of threat intelligence data. In addition, they have used this data to train state-of-the-art machine learning models to act preemptively against threats.

Layers (Email Security + Zero Trust)

Offering a cloud-based email security product makes sense on its own, but our vision for joining Area 1’s technology to Cloudflare is much larger. We are convinced that adding email security to our existing Zero Trust security platform will result in the best protection for our customers.

Why we are acquiring Area 1

Just as Cloudflare had put Area 1 in front of our existing email solution, many companies put two or more layered email protection products together. But layering is hard. Different products have different configuration mechanisms (some might use a UI, others an API, others might not support Terraform etc.), different reporting mechanisms, and incompatibilities that have to be worked around.

SMTP, the underlying email protocol, has been around since 1982 and in the intervening 40 years a lot of protocols have grown around SMTP to make it secure, add spoof protection, verify senders, and more. Getting layered email security products to work well with all those add-on protocols is hard.

And email doesn’t stand alone. The user’s email address is often the same thing as their company log in. It makes sense to bring Zero Trust and email security together.

Why we are acquiring Area 1

As we’ve discussed, email is a major vector for attacks, but it is not the only one. Email security is just one layer of an enterprise defense system. Most businesses have multiple layers of security to protect their employees and their assets. These defense layers reduce the risk that a system gets penetrated by an attacker. Now imagine all these layers were purpose-built to work with each other seamlessly, built into the same software stack, offered by a single vendor and available to you in 250+ locations around the world.

Imagine a world where you can turn on email security to protect you against phishing, but if for some reason an attacker were to get through to an employee’s inbox, you can create a rule to open any unrecognized link in an isolated remote browser with no text input allowed and scan all email attachments for known malware. That is the power of what we hope to achieve by adding Area 1’s technology onto Cloudflare’s Zero Trust security platform.

Bringing email and Zero Trust together opens up a world of possibilities in protecting email and the enterprise.

Shared Intelligence

At Cloudflare, we’re fans of closely knit products that deliver more value together than they do apart. We refer to that internally as 1+1=3. Incorporating Area 1 into our Zero Trust platform will deliver significant value to our customers, but protecting email is just the start.

Area 1 has spent years training their machine learning models with email data to deliver world-class security. Joining email threat data and Cloudflare’s threat data from our global network will give us incredible power to deliver improved security capabilities for our customers across our products.

Why we are acquiring Area 1

Shared vision

Together with the Area 1 team, we will continue to help build the world’s most robust cloud network and Zero Trust security platform.

On a final note, what struck us most about Area 1 is their shared vision for building a better (and more secure) Internet. Their team is smart, transparent, and curious, all traits we value tremendously at Cloudflare. We are convinced that together our teams can deliver tremendous value to our customers.

If you are interested in upcoming email security products, please register your interest here. You can learn more about the acquisition here or in Area 1’s blog.

The acquisition is expected to close early in the second quarter of 2022 and is subject to customary closing conditions. Until the transaction closes, Cloudflare and Area 1 Security remain separate and independent companies.

Why we are acquiring Area 1

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1Piper Sandler 1Q2021 Email Security Survey: Market Share
2Gartner, Market Guide for Email Security, 8 September 2020