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Thursday, March 28, 2024

FTC report examines web-hosting services for small businesses

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WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) — The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Feb. 20 that its staff has released a report detailing whether 11 web-hosting services for small businesses provide default email authentication and anti-phishing technologies.

According to the FTC, many of these services fail to provide the authentication and anti-phishing technologies. The FTC says this can leave small businesses open to phishing scams.

The report was titled “Do Web Hosts Protect Their Small Business Customers with Secure Hosting and Anti-Phishing Technologies?” According to the report, research shows that web hosts often help small businesses implement SSL/TLS, a technology that ensures users are visiting a legitimate website and not an imposter.

FTC staff notes, however, that only a few of the web hosts offer straightforward access to email authentication and anti-phishing technologies through domain-level authentication systems (SPF and DKIM). Additionally, none of the web hosts offer a technology that instructs receiving email services to reject messages that wrongly say they are from an address at the sender’s domain (DMARC).

FTC staff recommends to small businesses that they pay close attention to the offerings of these web hosts and to choose ones that will protect their websites and email account with SSL/TLS and email authentication technologies.

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