As part of a series of security updates for G Suite announced this week, Google says it is testing a new standard for email authentication that will display a company or brand icon next to email that Google has verified as legitimate, a measure that can help curb phishing and other malicious activities of bad actors.
With the brand indicators standard for message identification, Google start showing brand logos: from organizations with emails already authenticated using the DMARC system—In those little bubbles of user icons in Gmail. In order for your brand logos to appear in your inbox and indicate that the sender is who they say they are, brands will have to go through a background investigation process against abuse, which the company says would involve a validation process of a pair of certification authorities, Entrust Datacard and DigiCert.
This verification process should help curb phishing attempts and help users better identify when an email is coming from someone legitimate and not, for example, a scammer trying to steal your crap. Google said it would launch the pilot “in the coming weeks with a limited number of senders,” although BIMI could be adopted more widely in the future.
Seth Blank, cHair of the AuthIndicators Working Group and VP of Standards and Technologies at Valimail said in a statement that for those senders “who want to create a trusted brand presence by email, BIMI is a great opportunity, incentivizing them to implement strong authentication, which in turn, it will create a more secure and reliable email ecosystem for everyone. ”
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