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Red Sift analysed more than 78,000 email domains of UK charities to establish how many of them implement email authentication protocols to protect their organisations and their donors from cyber-attacks. Overall, under 1% of them have implemented email authentication with DMARC. The Top 100 Charities showed a slight increase in adoption (5%), however, none were blocking unauthorised email.

The finding follows the recent publication of a UK Government report which found that fraudulent emails (72%) and phishing attacks (27%) were amongst the most common types of attack on UK businesses, further highlighting the huge risks posed to the £70bn UK charity sector and the 67% of the UK population who engage with it.

Rahul Powar, Red Sift CEO, commented: “Fraudulent emails and phishing attacks pose a serious risk to businesses and the data that they hold. As such it is very concerning that UK charities, that make huge social and economic contributions despite often working with limited resources, are so exposed to these potentially hugely damaging attacks. By offering OnDMARC to all UK charities, we are taking a key step towards a more secure digital landscape for everyone.”

To help UK charities protect themselves against email-based cyberattacks, Red Sift is making its email cyber security product, OnDMARC, free to all registered UK charitable organisations. The solution enables users to quickly and easily deploy DMARC, a robust security protocol for protecting email, blocking phishing attacks, increasing deliverability of authorised emails and protecting their brand. DMARC protection ensures that only trustworthy sources can send email on behalf of your business; it also discourages cyber criminals from targeting a business that has DMARC protection.

The Turing Trust, a UK charity that provides computers and IT training to schools in Africa, has significantly enhanced its IT security following the deployment of OnDMARC in April to protect its email domain. In just two weeks following the deployment, the Trust blocked over 50 external phishing sources that were impersonating the Turing Trust’s email domain to send unauthorized spam and phishing emails.

Lady Nicola Turing of The Turing Trust, commented: “As a relatively small charity we have limited resources available to deal with any disruption to our operations. The volume of spam email we were receiving was having a negative impact on the team and creating a security risk to the organisation. Furthermore, the email validation issues we were encountering with our newsletters were also impacting on our communications with stakeholders and potential donors. Using OnDMARC, we have been able to quickly address these problems, blocking unauthorised emails and improving delivery rates of our email newsletters.”

“DMARC is a powerful tool to help combat some of the most difficult to detect types of email fraud. Red Sift’s initiative to help public charities protect themselves through their DMARC solution is admirable. We applaud their efforts and join them in encouraging all organizations to take action against email fraud with the power of DMARC,“ said Philip Reitinger, President and CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to reducing systemic cyber risk.

OnDMARC requires no cybersecurity expertise from users, and makes the setup and maintenance of a DMARC policy quick and simple. It uses AI to classify reports that are sent to the domain owner, identifying unauthorised email traffic and actively blocking phishing attempts, while increasing the deliverability of authorised emails.

The report, which details Red Sift’s findings and shows how organisations can deploy and use the DMARC protocol to protect their email, is available to download