Tips to Ensure the Prevention of Spoofing, Phishing and Spam in Google Workspace

With increasing dependency on the web and modernization of the industries moving to the cloud, data security and vulnerability to scams has become a major point of concern. Spoofing, Phishing, Spams are few threats an individual or an entire organization is always prone to in the current scenario. 

Now, what do these terms- Spoofing, Phishing and Spamming mean? 

Spoofing is a criminal activity where a scammer tries to get access to someone's personal information by pretending to be a legitimate business, a neighbour, or some other innocent party.

Phishing is a cyber attack that uses deceptive email as a source of weapon with the sole objective that to trick the email recipient into believing that the message is something they want or need like a request from their bank and to click a link or download an attachment and invariably gather personal information.

Spamming means sending unsolicited bulk messages through email. Email spam comes in different varieties, the most popular being to promote scams or marginally legitimate business schemes. It is used as a medium to promote access to pharmaceutical drugs, unrealistic weight loss programs, online degrees, job opportunities and gambling etc.

Now to cope with these ever-increasing threats, big companies who are pioneers of Cloud services like Google have come up with different methods and their enterprise-level securities have so far worked wonders for Organizations as well as for Individuals.

Below are a few tips that an Admin of an Organization who has just moved into cloud emails with Google Workspace can implement in order to prevent the threats.

• Ensure mail delivery & prevent spoofing with (SPF). Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication technique that publishes authorized mail servers to send emails for your domain. SPF protects your domain from spoofing and helps to ensure that messages are delivered correctly. 
• To prevent spoofing, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds an encrypted signature to the header of all outgoing messages. Email servers that get signed messages use DKIM to decrypt the message header and verify the message after it was sent, that it was not changed in between sending and receiving.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance or DMARC record is a standardized email authentication method used by organization admins to prevent hackers and other scammers from spoofing their domain. It also helps the admins to request reports that get messages from the company or domain from email servers. In order to help them recognize malicious activity and potential authentication problems for messages sent from their domain, these reports have details.

The 3 major security measures of DKIM, DMARC and SPF that Google recommends to ensure the prevention of spoofing, phishing and spam in Google Workspace boosts an organization’s dependency and helps them explore a secure email solution like Google Workspace.