As this topic covers Part 6 of our guide, it’s also worth recapping on what we’ve explored so far, if you haven’t already:  

• Part 1: Registrar access control  

• Part 2: Domain operations management  

• Part 3: Domain name protection  

• Part 4: DNS servers  

• Part 5: DNS zones  

Email security represents the next step in our guide, as another crucial aspect of robust modern business strategies. Here, we’ll cover their importance for modern businesses, and the threats posed by cyberattackers, before outlining four steps to secure your servers.  

Why Focus on Email Servers?  

Email servers form the backbone of your company’s communication network, managing all incoming and outgoing messages. Their security directly affects your organization’s trustworthiness and operational integrity. By properly configuring DNS records, you ensure secure and reliable email operations, much like installing a high-security lock on your mailbox. This approach prevents serious risks, such as email spoofing and corporate email compromise (BEC), where attackers could impersonate your domain and deceive recipients. By securing your email servers, you protect your communications and maintain trust.  

Now that we’ve established the importance of securing your email servers, let’s explore the types of attacks scammers use to target them—and how you can defend against these threats.  

Risks and Vulnerabilities of Email Servers  

When brand fail to secure your email servers properly, cyberscammers exploit any weaknesses to launch their attacks. Typical threats include email spoofing attacks. In email spoofing attacks, cybercriminals impersonate your domain to send malicious emails. They trick recipients into believing the emails are legitimate, then manipulate their targets into revealing valuable details like logins, financial records, and personal information. By exploiting the trust between you and your contacts, attackers profit at their victims’ expense.  

Corporate email compromise (BEC) poses another serious risk. Attackers craft fake emails that appear to come from within your organization, targeting employees and company partners. They trick their targets into transferring funds or sharing sensitive information, leading to financial losses and data breaches. BEC attacks exploit human trust and are often difficult to detect until it’s too late. Crucially, data breaches also lead to embarrassing press releases and fines and penalties from regulators.  

Understanding these attacks is the first step in building strong defenses. Next, we’ll explore effective strategies for protecting your email servers from these threats.  

Strategies for Protecting Your Email Servers  

Here’s four foundational email server cybersecurity strategies straight from our CTO. 

1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Defining your Authorized Mail Servers  

 SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, helps protect your domain from email spoofing by listing authorized mail servers in your DNS records. Think of SPF as a security guard at a gated community, only allowing residents (authorized servers) to send mail (emails) on behalf of your domain. This prevents imposters from sending fraudulent emails and enhances your email deliverability.  

To set up SPF, first identify the mail servers authorized to send emails for your domain. Create an SPF record that specifies these servers and add it to your DNS zone file. Regularly update this record to reflect any changes in your mail infrastructure, ensuring continuous protection against unauthorized email sources.  

2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Authenticating your Email Senders  

 DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, adds a crucial security layer by allowing recipients to verify that an email was sent from an authorized server and has not been altered. It works by generating a unique digital signature for each outgoing email and publishing the corresponding public key in your DNS records. This process helps recipients authenticate the email’s source, boosting trust and security.  

Implementing DKIM involves generating a private key to sign your emails and a public key for your DNS records. Ensure that your email servers are configured to use this DKIM signature for outgoing messages. For businesses focused on stability and growth, expertise in managing these security measures is vital. Corporate Domain Management professionals provide essential support by enhancing domain security, allowing brands to maintain their priorities and achieve their goals. Their expertise ensures that your email security measures are robust and effective.  

3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): Controlling your Email Delivery   

 DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, enhances email security by building on SPF and DKIM. Imagine DMARC as a well-trained security team at a VIP event. This team not only checks invitations (SPF and DKIM) but also decides how to handle guests who don’t have proper credentials, such as turning them away or alerting you to potential security issues.  

To implement DMARC, create a DMARC record in your DNS zone and set policies for managing emails that fail authentication checks. This setup enables you to reject unauthorized emails and significantly reduces the risk of spoofing and phishing attacks. Proper DMARC configuration ensures robust protection for your email communications, keeping your digital environment secure.  

4. NULL MX Record: Indicating Domains that Shouldn’t Receive Emails  

For domains that don’t handle email, you can manage incoming mail effectively by setting up a NULL MX record. Think of a NULL MX record as posting a “No Mail Accepted” sign on your front door. It tells other mail servers that your domain doesn’t receive any emails. This action prevents unwanted email traffic and lowers the risk of spam targeting your domain.  

An MX (Mail Exchange) record specifies which servers handle incoming emails for your domain. When you set an MX record, you designate servers to accept and process incoming emails. If your domain doesn’t handle email, use a NULL MX record with a value of “0” or “NULL” to inform other servers that no mail servers are available for your domain.  

To implement a NULL MX record, add it to your DNS zone file for domains that don’t process email. Update your DNS settings to include a record that specifies “no mail servers” for your domain. By doing this, you block any incoming email traffic, keeping your domain free of unwanted spam and other email-related issues.  

Conclusions: How Email Server Security Enhances Domain Protection  

Securing your email servers with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and NULL MX records proves essential for protecting your domain from email-based threats. These strategies ensure that your email communications stay secure, reliable, and trustworthy, safeguarding your organization against cyber threats. By implementing these measures, you enhance your email infrastructure security, improving your domain protection to protect your clients, your team, and your brand.  

Thank you for following our series so far! In our final installment, we’ll cover the concept of risk prevention in domain cybersecurity. Tackling this topic through the lens proactive measures helps brands get a head start on scams and cyberattacks, as we’ll learn. Until then, stay tuned! 

The post Domain Cybersecurity Checklist Part 6: Email Servers  appeared first on EBRAND.

Just to recap, so far we’ve covered the following:

• Part 1: Registrar access control
• Part 2: Domain operations management
• Part 3: Domain name protection

We’re tackling DNS servers today, understanding the threat landscape around this crucial technical infrastructure. Beyond that, we’ll outline and the best solutions to keep your business safe and effective online. 

What are DNS servers? 

Domain Name System servers form a fundamental piece of digital infrastructure for your business, just as important as a brick-and-mortar store’s doors, signs, or parking lot. At the functional level, Domain Name System servers link your IP addresses, websites, and email servers. Your clients and colleagues place their trust in your domains, and DNS servers help uphold this trust through safe navigation. Any interruptions to this navigation will slow your business down, impeding your revenue. Worse, DNS server hacks and poisonings threaten to throw your business into digital chaos.  

The risks of vulnerable DNS servers 

As we’ve established, DNS servers form a highway between your domains, websites, and emails. Digital highwaymen target this infrastructure to exploit your traffic for their own gain. DNS attacks typically aim to redirect, block, or steal from your traffic, at your company’s expense. 

Zone transfer and man-in-the-middle attacks 

In man-in-the-middle attacks, hackers intercept requests in vulnerable Domain Name System servers, potentially siphoning valuable information like payment details and passwords. Cybercriminals also target misconfigured and vulnerable DNS servers for unauthorized zone transfers and data exfiltration, potentially threatening massive leaks of proprietary information and customer data. 

With man-in-the-middle attacks, and many kinds of DNS Server risks, legitimate businesses don’t even learn about the vulnerability until after the attacker wreaks havoc with their traffic, stealing data and funds from innocent victims.

DDoS attacks and downtimes 

Website downtime creates holes in your cybersecurity, and hackers exploit this concept by targeting your DNS servers with DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attacks. These attacks coordinate teams of bots and hackers to overwhelm your servers with a tide of requests, submerging your DNS and freezing your websites. Successful DDoS attacks inflict costly downtimes and further hacking risks. 

DDoS attacks inflict panic and uncertainty on their victims, while lowering defenses so that cybercriminals can infiltrate. Businesses must prepare for these kinds of attacks, and one proactive strategy simply involves learning about cyberattacks and how to solve them. Discover eight common types of domain attacks in our guide right here.

Spoofing and redirects 

DNS servers act as branded signage, taking visitors safely to your outlets. However, hackers can take control of this signage, leading visitors off the beaten path into uncharted territory online. When cybercriminals hack DNS servers, they often redirect journeys towards phishing websites and malware downloads, spreading cyberattacks in your brand’s name.

Businesses must therefore secure their DNS servers to protect their brands, their team, and their clients. You’ll find a list of effective DNS server security measures below. 

Techniques to improve your DNS server security 

Now we know the risks to your DNS servers, it’s time to explore some solutions. Below, we’ve listed four effective cybersecurity tactics from our CTO. 

1. Diverse server topology and dispersed geography  

When it comes to protecting your Domain Name System server, there’s safety in numbers. Secure businesses set up at least three authoritative DNS servers, geographically separated into different data centers. Setting up a strategic network of servers, rather than one point of weakness, makes it far harder to overwhelm your capacity. Businesses can then distribute their servers on distinct address blocks and extensions (TLDs), so that cybercriminals don’t know which targets to attack. Ultimately, diversifying your server topology and geography minimizes disruptions, enhances reliability, and creates a secure, stable environment for your business to flourish online. 

2. Anycast DNS

Setting up an Anycast DNS server uses the same principle of diversification to reinforce your infrastructure. Increasing the quantity of DNS servers improves your security, but Anycast delivers an improved quality to complement your strategy. Conventional unicast connects a single server to a query, but Anycast DNS allows a network of servers to answer a query with whichever node proves most optimal at the time. This flexibility creates a fast, dynamic DNS solution that maximizes availability for even your most sensitive domain. Anycast DNS mitigates geographic outages, improves your website performance, and strengthens your domain cybersecurity on a global scale. 

3. IPv4 + IPv6  

Compatibility fuels effective business transactions, whether we’re talking payment compatibility at store checkouts, or IP compatibility on your DNS servers. When it comes to DNS, security-minded businesses ensure that their servers stay compatible with the two main types of IP address format, namely IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 uses eight sets of numbers to document its digital addresses, compared with IPv4’s four sets, but both versions still find widespread use across the internet. Checking that your server supports each version helps you unlock the inherent cybersecurity features in IPv4 and IPv6, while ensuring that you don’t lose any valuable traffic from incompatible IPs. 

4. Monitoring  

Monitoring presents another theme echoing throughout different forms of cybersecurity, as real-time information delivers the details you’ll need to protect your businesses online. Cybersecure businesses setup multiple channels of DNS monitoring, including automatic queries, response time analysis, record checks, zone synchronization monitoring, and more. Monitoring often provides the first early warning before serious website downtime, or a cyberattack. This kind of information helps you react fast to secure your ecommerce, protect your team, and minimize the impact on your client base. In general, updates about the health of your infrastructure supports the kind of peace-of-mind necessary for successful ecommerce.  

Conclusion: How DNS servers secure your business

To summarize, we’ve covered four foundational steps that help your business build robust and high-performing Domain Name System servers. Diversifying your server quality and quantity, while creating compatible and regularly monitored assets, provides comprehensive server cybersecurity. This helps deter cyberattackers, and ensure that your website visitors navigate from A to B without a hitch.  As part of an effective Corporate Domain Management strategy, you’ll secure your servers and capitalize on your brand’s online presence.

Domain cybersecurity creates high-achieving teams and lucrative businesses, as we aim to establish throughout this checklist. Thanks again for reading, and stay tuned for Part 5, on DNS zones. There, we’ll tackle fundamental challenges like domain name content and configuration, along with the powerful suite of DNSSEC. We’ll see you there! 

The post Domain Cybersecurity Checklist Part 4: DNS Servers appeared first on EBRAND.

Here, in Part 3, we’ll tackle another vital principle in domain security, so let’s dive in.  

Domain Cybersecurity Strategy 3: Domain name protection  

Domain names form a crucial cornerstone of the internet. Around this cornerstone, businesses build the robust walls of a valuable online presence. An effective online presence means productive branding and lucrative commerce, so it’s well worth a company’s time to get it right. However, that’s far easier said than done. While businesses typically secure their websites and emails, they often neglect the domain itself. We must all ensure that our domain names remain active and under our control.  

Here, we’ll cover all the essential principles and tools for securing your domains. These protocols help prevent cracks in your cornerstones and ensure your digital buildings stay firm and effective.  

Transfer Locks 

Activating a transfer lock on your domain names is important for several reasons: 

• Prevents Unauthorized Transfers: It stops unauthorized parties from transferring your domain to another registrar, crucial for preventing domain hijacking. 
• Protects Brand Identity: Your domain is integral to your brand. A transfer lock helps ensure that your brand identity remains under your control. 
• Avoids Disruption of Services: Losing control of your domain can lead to disruptions in your website, email, and other services. A transfer lock maintains business continuity. 

As cyberthreats rise, fuelled in part by smarter hijacking algorithms, the internet becomes a higher risk area to park your assets, and locks become even more valuable. Transfer locks deliver that value, restricting any unauthorized transfer requests, and ensuring that only authenticated individuals with the correct codes can transfer your domains from your current registrar to another.  

To apply a transfer lock, you need to work closely with your domain registrar’s control panel, either by yourself, or by collaborating with domain management experts. These domain name protection tools help reinforce your brand’s online presence, creating a proactive defense mechanism to secure your portfolio.  

Registry level locks 

To protect domain names from changes and hijacks, secure businesses implement registry level locks. These tools offer significant security benefits, including the following: 

• Enhanced Security Against Unauthorized Changes: They provide an additional layer of protection above standard transfer locks, preventing unauthorized changes at the registry level. 
• Protection Against Domain Hijacking: By securing the domain directly at the registry, these locks are highly effective in preventing domain hijacking. 
• Business Continuity Assurance: They help ensure that your domain remains secure and operational, avoiding disruptions to your website and related services. 

Registry level locks apply the industry-standard principles of multi-factor authentication all the way up your domain infrastructure. These principles protecting your email, websites, and ecommerce sites. Adding MFA mandates human confirmation from the domain owner, registrar, and registry for any change request. Ultimately, MFA streamlines domain name protection, whether your interactions involve contacts or DNS servers. These principles mitigate hacks, hijacks, and human error alike.  

Registrant Information: Cybersecurity and compliance

National and international laws govern domain cybersecurity, helping keep your business and its visitors safe. However, companies must follow these rules to stay on the right side of regulators. The ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires registrars to validate and verify certain Whois data fields, which may include contacting you by phone, email or postal mail. Registrars must suspend or delete domain names that are not timely verified.   

This verification is crucial for several reasons, including addressing Whois inaccuracy complaints and managing domain transfer matters. Regularly updating and confirming your domain’s contact details is a proactive step in safeguarding your online presence and ensuring compliance with regulatory standard. 

Automatic renewal and long-term registration

Imagine your domain name as the cornerstone of your digital presence, essential not only for customer interaction but also for the smooth operation of your internal systems. Imagine the chaos if this cornerstone were to suddenly disappear because the domain expired: customers are met with dead ends, employees cannot access crucial work systems, and vital internal processes come to a standstill. This disruption, all due to an overlooked domain renewal, can significantly impact your business operations and damage trust. 

To fortify your digital foundations, treat your domain as a vital asset. Engage automatic renewal to prevent accidental lapses. For domains critical to your business, consider securing them for up to 10 years. This long-term approach not only provides peace of mind but also ensures uninterrupted operation of both external and internal digital services, maintaining the seamless functionality and reliability your business, employees, and customers depend on. 

Domain Retention

When managing domain portfolios, it’s important to balance the need to be resource-efficient with the risks associated with letting domains expire. While not all domains may be valuable to retain, allowing previously used domains to expire can be risky. This is because expired domains can be registered by third parties, potentially leading to unauthorized access to previously associated websites, files, and emails. 

Effective domain management involves conducting thorough research to determine which domains are worth keeping, based on their history, previous use, and associated risks. This approach helps in making informed decisions about domain retention, ensuring both security and efficient use of resources. 

Again, manually conducting, compiling, and building a strategy with domain name expiration research requires plenty of resources. From providing expertise to saving your company time, EBRAND Corporate Domain Management experts would be happy to help.  

Conclusion: Domain name cybersecurity

In conclusion, strengthening your domain’s cybersecurity  requires a strategic blend of protective measures. By implementing Transfer Locks, Registry Level Locks, maintaining accurate Registrant Information, enabling Automatic Renewal, and conducting Domain Name Expiration Searches, you  create a multi-layered defense against potential threats and disruptions.   

We appreciate you taking the time to explore these essential strategies. To tailor this domain checklist to your company’s bespoke need, just get the conversation started with our EBRAND experts. In the meantime, you should also stay tuned for Part 4! There, we’ll delve into the critical realm of DNS Servers. We’ll see you there! 

The post The Definitive Domain Cybersecurity Checklist: Part 3  appeared first on EBRAND.

Below, you’ll find ten common domain impersonation strategies. Learning each strategy informs your threat intelligence with the insights required to unmask digital attackers. Each point also includes a technical solution, provided by our anti-phishing experts. 

1. Doppelgänger domain impersonation

Doppelgängers, or eerily identical twins, often crop up in horror films and ghost stories. The same goes for phishing websites, where doppelgänger domains appear identical to a legitimate fully qualified domain name (FQDN). However, these impersonators miss the crucial dot between host/subdomain and domain, imitating an FQDN for malicious purposes. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• www-genericdomain.com 
• wwwgenericdomain.com 

Solution: You can stop these doppelgängers reactively or proactively. Reactive approaches include asking registrars or other authorities to take these suspicious domains down, while proactive businesses register or block hazardous domains and subdomains before they fall into a cybercriminal’s hands. 

2. IDN Spoofing

IDN stands for Internationalized Domain Names, and with these kinds of attacks, cybercriminals exploit international alphabets to trick their targets. As IDNs support letters from scripts like Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese, several characters from different alphabets appear similar to those in the English alphabet. These often include the Greek “α” in place of the English “a” or the Cyrillic “е” in place of its English counterpart. In IDN homoglyph attacks, cybercriminals intentionally substitute lookalike characters to mimic legitimate domains. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericdօmain.com 
• genericdomαin.com  

Solution: To get ahead of IDN spoofers, you have to research the most visually confusing domains in and around your brand. If necessary, you can then block or register any assets that seem vulnerable to a spoofing attack. 

3. Homographic impersonation

In linguistics, pairs of characters that look alike are known as homographs. For example, the similarities between “l” (lower case letter “L”) and “1” (the number) often confuse readers.  

The same goes for “O” (the capital letter) and “0” (the number). Phishing attackers intentionally exploit this confusion in their domain spoofing tactics. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericclomain.com 
• Genericdonnain.com 

Solution: Make sure you’re aware of any available domains with homographs that could confuse your online traffic. You can then review them and register any assets if necessary. 

4. Typo-squatting

Everyone makes mistakes, especially when we’re writing or typing in a rush. Typo-squatting impersonation makes the most of these mistakes, registering domains around common typos for their target brands. They base these variations on keyboard key proximity, and common typos over different keyboard layouts. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericdomian.com 
• genericdimain.com 

Solution: Again, proactive businesses typically research common typos around their brand, either with smart solutions like Corporate Domain Management, manual typing research, or reactive takedown requests.  

5. TLD Squatting

Crafty criminals register identical names to their target brand, but on a different top-level domain (TLD). The internet’s governance bodies ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) created over 1,500 TLDs, leaving plenty of options for hackers to spoof legitimate brands. Phishing gangs could impersonate your brand across country code TLDs like .SU (Soviet Union) or generic TLDs like .zip and .xyx. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericdomain.cm 
• genericdomain.co 
• genericdomain.pk 

Solution: As a digital strategy best practice, businesses should register the domains for each country they operate in, and wherever they own trademarks. You can also register your brand’s main gTLD (generic top-level domain), and subscribe to block lists such as TMCH, DPML, and Adult Block. 

6. Combo Squatting

Brands typically support their customers with various different digital resources, often registering domains that combine their business name with the name of a service. These combinations open another spoofing vector for phishing attacks.  

Combo squatting occurs when phishing attackers create variations of the target where a generic word like “support” or a country appears in the domain name. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericdomain.com 
• genericdomain-france.com 
• genericdomaingermany.com 

Solution: Review the list of the most used words in the domain name space, and register the name if necessary. 

7. Level Squatting

This simple yet effective attack takes an existing website and registers the same string with an additional subdomain. To the non-trained eye, these subdomains seem like legitimate extensions, worth trusting with your login information or financial details. A visitor in a rush may not even clock the subdomain at all, falling victim to a malicious phishing attack. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericdomain.com.shady-domain.net 

Solution: Businesses find technical solutions to level squatting by monitoring sources like passive DNS and SSL certificates. 

8. Subdomain Takeover

Cloud services often benefit businesses and their users alike, but again, hackers target subdomains to trick traffic. Subdomain takeovers use the domain name in a subdomain of a cloud service to generate believable impersonations. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• genericdomain.azurewebsites.net 
• genericdomain.atlassian.com 
• genericdomain.gitlab.com 
• genericdomain.wix.com 

Solution: Similarly, businesses can also monitor sources like passive DNS and SSL certificates to detect subdomain takeover. 

9. Domain Shadowing and subdomain impersonation

Beyond hacking their audience directly, phishing attackers also target businesses and their domain admins. Hacking a domain admin’s account lets a criminal create multiple subdomains in the domain to evade detection. 

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• suspicious.genericdomain.com 

Solution: Defending against domain shadowing requires robust domain security measures, including 2FA, IP Limitations, 4-eyes review, activity logs, and more. You can find out more about each of those strategies, and how to implement them for your business, in our CTO’s domain cybersecurity checklist.  

10. Sound-squatting

Last but not least, it’s important to acknowledge emerging technology in the battle against domain impersonations. Cybercriminals also exploit smart devices and voice control, registering phishing domains that sound like their targets, as well as look like them. 

Using homophones therefore empowers a phishing attacker to trick visitors who may be unfamiliar with written English, or rely on voice assistants.

Examples for genericdomain.com 

• jenericdomain.com 
• generikdomain.com 
• genericdomane.com 

Solution: Solving this last tactic also requires research and manual effort, or support from Corporate Domain Management experts. Robust businesses must detect all of the most confusing aurally confusing domains that mimic their brand. After checking for each aural match, you can block phishing attacks by registering domains across potential impersonation vectors. 

Conclusions

Understanding these common domain phishing strategies helps you build an effective foundational awareness of the threats facing your business. However, knowledge in the abstract only takes you so far. Proactive steps like training your team, detecting domain threats, and eliminating impersonations delivers a safe, productive landscape for yourself and your clients. 

The post Top ten impersonation techniques used in phishing domains appeared first on EBRAND.

Today, we’ll address registrar access control, a key area of Corporate Domain Management. Anouar’s checklist details each step of the way, before moving on to the next crucial topic. These guides will deliver plenty of value for your business, so let’s get right into it.   

Domain Cybersecurity Strategy 1: Registrar access control

We’re starting this domain security series with registrars for a simple reason: if someone gains access to your domain, your entire online business could fall apart. It’s like a burglar getting the keys to your house, and gaining full control of your front door, your car, and your valuables. When trusting third-party registrars with these keys, it’s easy to forget what’s at stake.   

Domain registrars stand at the vulnerable intersection between websites and registries, so businesses must secure their operations at all costs. Choosing a strong registrar, and proofing your protocols against cyberattacks keeps your website, and its keys, safe and sound.  

Individual Access

The concept of individual access in domain security means minimizing risk and establishing accountability with unique domain registrar passwords. Creating dedicated access to the registrar’s platform for each employee upgrades cybersecurity to a “need to know” basis. Good practice dictates that you never share access to the registrar’s platform account with a third party, internal or external to the company.   

Along with updating your password policy, this keeps the doors to your domains secure.   

Password Policy

In the cybersecurity world, the saying goes that passwords are like underwear. Don’t share them with anyone, change them regularly, and ensure you don’t show them to anyone you shouldn’t. Enabling strong password enforcement policy means enforcing a high standard of password strength and a regular expiration strategy. Strong password policies reduce the risk of exposure to brute-force and dictionary attacks against your account credentials.   

Ultimately, if one person in your team sets theirs as “password123”, it places your whole team, your business, your clients, and your revenue under threat.   

Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds another dimension to password security, disarming cybercriminals and protecting your business from brute-force attacks.    

MFA verifies users on your sensitive platforms by asking them something they know (the password) and something they have (typically a secondary token sent to an email address or cell phone). Adding multiple steps to this process, like requiring biometric fingerprint checks, also strengthens your defences. When cybercriminals guess or steal your passwords, MFA stops them in their tracks. Laws like GDPR and NIS 2 also strongly suggest MFA strategies, so the practice supports smooth compliance.   

While authentication can seem slow or frustrating, its far less annoying and costly than a data breach or a compliance fine.   

IP Restriction 

These registrar access control policies work to make sure the right people get access to your domains, not cybercriminals. If your business uses an identifiable network, from an office WIFI or corporate VPN, then limit the IP addresses on your registrar account. This means that you limit the origins of the traffic on your registrar account, and ensure that malicious third parties, be they rogue ex-employees or scam farms in Southeast Asia, can’t tamper with your domain registry. 

IP restriction secures another link in your cybersecurity chain. This tactic, also known as geofencing, keeps your domain in the hands of your corporate colleagues, and not a hacking gang on the other side of the world.   

Conclusions: Boosting your cybersecurity with domain management solutions

Thanks for joining EBRAND, and our CTO, on part one of the definitive domain cybersecurity checklist. Now we’ve secured your registrar access, it’s time for Part 2: Domain Operations Management. Our operations management topic tackles strategic points like duties and logging, before delving into the technical areas of DNS Zones and records. Stay tuned!   

If you’re keen to discuss what we’ve covered so far, or get a sneak peek of a domain security checklist tailored to your needs, get in touch with EBRAND experts directly, or check out our Corporate Domain Management solution now. 

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