ITV broadcasts their cybersecurity credentials with OnDMARC

Learn more about OnDMARC
ITV logo

Industry

Media

Employees

6000+

Locations

Great Britain

Meet the company

ITV is successfully navigating the changing landscape of television through creating and distributing high-quality content via the largest family of commercial channels in the UK and on-demand via its ITV Hub.

Authenticating communications to give viewers confidence in ITV’s digital services

As a modern broadcaster, ITV has gradually increased its digital presence over the past decade to the point where it now has multiple points of email interaction with viewers, sending over 15 million emails in just 90 days, for example. Emails could be to confirm login details for a viewer’s ITV Hub account, acknowledge competition entries or for ITV Hub subscribers, making sure payment details are securely taken and processed.

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What ITV say about us

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"The diligence and support of the whole OnDMARC team has been second to none. Not only have they got back to us really quickly, they’ve usually seen it before and have an answer. I’ve never felt like I had to do this on my own."

Grant Currie ITV
Grant Currie
Business Analyst
ITV logo

"The diligence and support of the whole OnDMARC team has been second to none. Not only have they got back to us really quickly, they’ve usually seen it before and have an answer. I’ve never felt like I had to do this on my own."

Grant Currie ITV
Grant Currie
Business Analyst

Robust email authentication security needed

ITV needed to have robust email authentication security in place so both viewers and employees could rest assured that when an email said it came from ITV, it truly did. ITV quickly identified that OnDMARC could help them achieve this by protecting all their domains against impersonation.

  1. Insight into where to start

    When Business Analyst Grant Currie set out to tackle ITV’s DMARC project with OnDMARC the hardest part was knowing where to start. Initial estimates put the number of subdomains ITV owned at somewhere between 800 and 1,000, due to a mixture of parked domains, production houses and regional instances. With OnDMARC’s guidance, 1018 domains are now in reject.

  2. Building a futureproof email architecture

    Once implementation was underway a unique OnDMARC feature, Dynamic SPF, quickly came to the fore. Enabling Grant and the team to get on with configuration changes without coding Dynamic SPF not only sped up configuration but enabled them to overcome the 10 SPF lookup limit that plagues traditional solutions.

  3. Pathfinding with APIs

    OnDMARC’s Open API meant ITV could integrate with existing business systems. After pulling the stats for 1,000+ domains into Google Sheets, insight revealed that traffic only flowed to 200 of those domains. “We could start with the lower hanging fruit and work our way up to the bigger, more complex domains finishing on ITV.com itself,” said Grant, ITV’s Business Analyst.

Securing the supply chain

For ITV, working with a large number of suppliers is part and parcel of being a creator and distributor of content. From production houses to marketing agencies, ITV often needs these suppliers to send emails on their behalf which meant the process of rolling out OnDMARC soon flagged up suppliers who couldn’t support authentication.

Whilst an interim solution has been found for suppliers who can’t support DKIM, the insight from OnDMARC has given Grant and his team the ammunition they needed to define a robust supplier cybersecurity strategy. From now on all new domains must start in p=reject state and the supplier must support it or not send any emails. In Grant’s own words “It’s all part of being a good digital citizen.”

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