An estimated 6.4 billion fake emails are sent worldwide every day, posing a serious problems for businesses and industries, a U.S. firm on email security said Wednesday.
The number only includes exact-domain sender spoofing, in which senders put a fake email address in the From: field of their messages, Valimail, an American company that provides fully automated email authentication service to business and organizations, said in its latest 2018 Email Fraud Landscape report.
The San Francisco-based company said fake emails are rampant as it's easy for an impostor to imitate another person by manipulating the 'From:' and 'Reply-to:' fields in an email header.
Valimail quoted a recent report of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation as saying that the business email compromise costs have reached 12 billion U.S. dollars over the past several years.
"Valimail's research shows that fake email continues to be a major problem worldwide," said Alexander Garcia-Tobar, CEO and co-founder of the company.
Valimail said its researchers conducted the study by using proprietary data from its analysis of billions of email message authentication requests, in addition to an analysis of more than 3 million publicly accessible records.
It proposed measures to prevent fake emails by adopting anti-impersonation technologies and email authentication standards, such as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), one of three key Internet standards.
Emails can also be secured by the other two Internet standards that enable email authentication, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and DomainKeys Identified Mail, according to the company.
"Authentication is at the root of trusted communications," Garcia-Tobar said in May this year when his company completed a 25 million-dollar Series B round participated by some key investors such as Bloomberg Beta.
