Many Fortune 500, FTSE 100 and ASX 100 companies have failed to properly implement the DMARC standard, exposing their customers and partners to phishing and other email-based attacks, according to email security firm Agari.
In a report titled “Global DMARC Adoption Report: Open Season for Phishers,” Agari, which in the past years has obtained tens of millions of dollars in funding, shared the results of its analysis into the adoption of DMARC.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol designed to detect and prevent email spoofing.
Organizations using DMARC can specify what happens to unauthenticated messages: they can be monitored but still delivered to the recipient’s inbox (none), they can be moved to the spam or junk folder (quarantine), or their delivery can be blocked completely (reject).
Agari’s analysis of public DNS records showed that only five percent of Fortune 500 companies have implemented a reject policy and three percent use the quarantine policy. Roughly two-thirds of these organizations have not published any type of DMARC policy.
The sectors with the highest adoption of the reject and quarantine policies are business services, financial, technology and transportation. The security firm has identified several sectors where not one organization has adopted these policies, including wholesales, motor vehicles, apparel, hospitality, food and drug stores, energy, aerospace, household products, chemicals, and engineering and construction.
In the case of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies, the percentage is similar. Two-thirds have not implemented DMARC and only seven percent are using a reject or quarantine policy. Only a handful of real estate and financial services firms in the FTSE 100 have implemented proper DMARC policies.
An analysis of Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) 100 organizations showed that a DMARC policy is absent in 73 percent of cases. Only three companies from the utilities, industrial and consumer discretionary sectors have implemented a reject policy and one company in the materials sector is using a quarantine policy.
These figures are worrying considering that there are tens of thousands of phishing websites and their number has increased considerably in the past years.
Related: Top Websites Fail to Prevent Email Spoofing

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Exploitation of 55 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Came to Light in 2022: Mandiant
- Organizations Notified of Remotely Exploitable Vulnerabilities in Aveva HMI, SCADA Products
- Waterfall Security, TXOne Networks Launch New OT Security Appliances
- Hitachi Energy Blames Data Breach on Zero-Day as Ransomware Gang Threatens Firm
- New York Man Arrested for Running BreachForums Cybercrime Website
- Exploitation of Recent Fortinet Zero-Day Linked to Chinese Cyberspies
- Mozilla Patches High-Severity Vulnerabilities With Release of Firefox 111
- Microsoft: 17 European Nations Targeted by Russia in 2023 as Espionage Ramping Up
Latest News
- Verosint Launches Account Fraud Detection and Prevention Platform
- Ransomware Gang Publishes Data Allegedly Stolen From Maritime Firm Royal Dirkzwager
- Zoom Paid Out $3.9 Million in Bug Bounties in 2022
- Oleria Scores $8M Seed Funding for ID Authentication Technology
- Exploitation of 55 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Came to Light in 2022: Mandiant
- News Analysis: UK Commits $3 Billion to Support National Quantum Strategy
- Malicious NuGet Packages Used to Target .NET Developers
- Google Pixel Vulnerability Allows Recovery of Cropped Screenshots
