PODCAST | Email impersonators and the risk they present to business

Email impersonation — what it is, its impact on businesses and possible protections against it — is the focus in this edition of the Business Day Spotlight. 

Our host Mudiwa Gavaza is joined by Steve Porter, MD of IronTree, and Sacha Matulovich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Sendmarc.

The discussion focuses on efforts being made by the technology sector to tackle email impersonation.

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Porter and Matulovich detail a new partnership that sees their two companies working to offer businesses a solution to cyber breaches done through email. 

IronTree, which was acquired by JSE-listed Metrofile in December 2021, provides data management services including cloud backup, disaster recovery and specialised server hosting in a private cloud. It also offers cybercrime and ransomware prevention, ongoing privacy law compliance management and business continuity planning services.

Sendmarc specialises in mitigating a flaw in email design that lets a criminal insert any sender’s address in a forged email, a tactic now widely exploited by criminals. 

Protection against this type of criminal behaviour is at the centre of the partnership. 

Topics of discussion include: IronTree and Sendmarc’s respective business models; details around the partnership between the two companies; ways in which email impersonation is perpetrated; and tools for mitigating this risk. 

As part of an effort to deal with this issue, over two million companies have adopted the global security standard for email, called DMARC, which was established a few years ago by a consortium of the world's largest technology companies to create a global protocol that will end the impersonation problem.

Some of the standard’s main backers include: Google, Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, the US department of homeland security and the EU government.