From IP to Domain reputation,...

Originally published on LinkedIn

...the role of ICANN in fighting Internet Crime.

Some days, SPAM, the emails people do not want, can represent between 70 to 90% of all email traffic. A large portion of these emails come from compromised machines, either individual machines at home, or machines at large hosting facilities.

Some of these emails come from misguided companies and organizations. In this last case, these companies can be educated on how to send commercial emails. However there is a new stream of emails coming from compromised email accounts. These emails are particularly hard to detect, because they come from a usually reputable source, using text that seems normal for anti-spam engines.

While early SPAM was for immediate benefit, via the advertisement of more or less legitimate products, nowadays SPAM is used to compromise and control as many computers as possible and through them to get access to various resources, including the financial or data of the machine owners.

The email industry is pivoting, with these threats, but also with the nascent adoption of IPv6 for email, it becomes more and more essential to only accept authenticated emails. Authenticated in the sense that a domain is linked to the email. Some of these technologies are SPF, DKIM, TLS or more recently DMARC (see Wikipedia for a an explanation of each).