DNS-Based Defense: DMARC

In this lesson, we will discuss Domain-Based Message Authenticatioin, Reporting, and Conference and how it can help defend against phishing attacks.

Introduction #

DMARC, or Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is another DNS-based email tool. It’s built on top of SPF and DKIM and has two main uses. First, it can be used to help troubleshoot complex SPF and/or DKIM rules. Second, it can be used to collect forged emails for later analysis. Let’s take a look at the DMARC records in use for punkgrok.org. We do this by looking at the TXT DNS records for _dmarc.punkgrok.org, as follows:

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dig _dmarc.punkgrok.org txt

The output should be similar to the following:

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> _dmarc.punkgrok.org txt
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 16424
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;_dmarc.punkgrok.org.          
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