Salesforce SPF and now DKIM support

Salesforce has published a SPF record for sending emails from Salesforce for years and with the Spring ’15 release, they will provide the option to sign with DKIM.
The SPF record is straight forward, include:_spf.salesforce.com which includes _spf.google.com, _spfblock.salesforce.com, several IP address blocks, mx, and ends with a SoftFail ~all.
Salesforce Knowledge Article Number: 000006347 goes in-depth with information regarding their SPF Record.

With the Spring ’15 Release, Salesforce offers the ability sign outbound emails with DomainKeys (DKIM).

DKIM signing of outbound email is available for Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.  Salesforce recommends that you add the public key to your DNS before activating DKIM signing.  There is a limit of 1 DKIM key per domain and Salesforce gives you the option to domain match and sign emails for the domain only, subdomain only, or domain and subdomains.  More information about Salesforce DKIM signing can be found within their Spring 15’ Release Notes.
The ability to sign with non-Salesforce DKIM keys means that Salesforce users now have the option to use DMARC. Prior to this change all mail was authenticated as coming from Salesforce, which is perfectly acceptable and how authentication works. The ability to sign with the users’ DKIM key and domain means large Salesforce users are now able to track authentication failures or publish DMARC policy requests.

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Spam, Phish or Malware?

Some mornings I check mail from my phone. This showed up this morning.
PizzaHutMail
My first thought was “oh, no, Pizza Hut is spamming, wonder who sold them my address.”
Then I remembered that iOS is horrible and won’t show you anything other than the Friendly From and maybe it was some weird phishing scheme.
When I got to my real mail client I checked headers, and sure enough, it wasn’t really from Pizza Hut. I’m guessing actually malware, but I don’t have a forensics machine to click the link and I’m not doing it on anything I can’t wipe (and have isolated from the rest of my network).
The frustrating thing for me is that this is an authenticated email. It not from Pizza Hut, the address belongs to some company in France. Apparently, that company has had their systems cracked and malware sent through them. Fully authenticated malware, pretending to be Pizza Hut, and passing authentication on various devices.
Pizza Hut isn’t currently publishing a DMARC record, but in this case, a DMARC record for Pizza Hut wouldn’t matter. None of the email addresses in the headers point to Pizza Hut.
I spent last week listening to a lot of people discussing DMARC and authentication and protecting people from scams and headers. But those all the protocols in the world won’t protect against this kind of thing. Phishing and malware can’t be fixed by technology alone. Even if every domain on the planet published a p=reject policy, mail like this would still get through.
 
 
 

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Troubleshooting tools

There have been a number of comments on my post about Hotmail moving to SPF authentication having to do with troubleshooting authentication failures. I have been helping clients troubleshoot these issues, and am able to take on new clients to solve authentication problems. Contact me for more information.
Of course, many of these issues can be solved with access to the right tools. Steve’s been working on a number of tools that may help the troubleshooting process and we’ve recently launched them on Emailstuff.org. The website itself contains a number of DNS and data related tools we use for investigations and thought we’d share with the public at large.
One of the really useful tools is the SPF record expander. Plug in any domain, like google.com, and see what IP addresses they authorize to send mail.

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