MINNEAPOLIS (July 15, 2021) — Fortra's Agari, a market leader in phishing defense for the enterprise, today announced that its Agari Brand Protection solution for Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) email authentication has been enhanced to help customers take advantage of Google’s newly launched support for BIMI in Gmail. BIMI—or Brand Indicators for Message Identification—is an industry-wide standards effort to increase email security at a time when cyber theft and hacking are on the rise. BIMI builds on the DMARC standard to allow Gmail and other mailbox providers to display a brand’s verified logo to signify the sender’s domain has been authenticated. This visual cue indicates the email is from a trusted entity and is safe for recipients to open.
Sophisticated email phishing campaigns are designed to fool users into clicking on what looks like a legitimate message from a company they know, when it is in fact a ploy for a cybercriminal to trick the recipient into transferring funds or revealing credentials that allow the hacker to gain entry into the recipient’s system to launch malware. “BIMI builds on growing expectations to display verified logos alongside authenticated email messages and shows a sender is doing everything possible to secure the emails coming from their domain,” said Ciaran Rafferty, Managing Director of Email Security, Fortra. “Agari has long been a leader in the email security community. Many well-known companies already look to Agari Brand Protection to automate and simplify their DMARC email authentication, and now we’re making it easy for our customers to get additional benefit from BIMI on their domain.”
DMARC is the first step in the BIMI process as it allows email senders to prove they are authorized to send messages from that domain. Validation of logo ownership is a sister component, whereby a certification authority such as Agari partner Entrust provides a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). With its newly-enhanced support for VMC, the Agari solution makes it easy for IT or security teams to manage everything Gmail requires to display the logo: DMARC and related records in the domain name system (DNS), the logo image, and the VMC. While the company sending the email can set up DMARC and BIMI, the Gmail platform ultimately makes the determination that the email has passed all security checkpoints and can be trusted, ultimately enabling the logo to display in the Gmail user’s inbox.
Agari Brand Protection is especially beneficial for enterprises with complex email environments that span multiple third-party systems sending communications from their domains. These can include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, email marketing engines, traditional email platforms, and more, all of which are challenging and time-consuming to implement DMARC and BIMI using other methods.
About Agari
Agari is the Trusted Email Identity Company™, protecting brands and people from devastating phishing and socially-engineered attacks. Using applied data science and a diverse set of signals, Agari protects the workforce from inbound business email compromise, supply chain fraud, spear phishing, and account takeover-based attacks, reducing business risk and restoring trust to the inbox. Agari also prevents spoofing of outbound email from the enterprise to customers, increasing deliverability and preserving brand integrity. Agari was acquired by Fortra in May 2021. Learn more at www.agari.com.
About Fortra
Fortra is a software company focused on helping exceptional organizations Build a Better IT™. Our cybersecurity and automation software simplifies critical IT processes to give our customers peace of mind. We know IT transformation is a journey, not a destination. Let’s move forward. Learn more at www.fortra.com
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