As scary as it may seem, everyone is a target on the Web. Worse, your susceptibility to cyber attacks, when not promptly addressed, marks you not just as a target but can even lead others to consider you as a threat.

How so?

When mismanaged, for example, some of your email communications can end up being perceived as spam by servers refusing to deliver your emails. In the long run, Internet service providers (ISPs) may even decide to block your domains altogether.

Sounds like something to avoid, and here’s where domain reputation comes in and allows you to plug the holes that leave you open to suspicion and attacks. Let’s see how.

Domain Reputation Is a Measure of Trustworthiness

Your domain reputation can inspire confidence since it shows your domain’s ability or readiness to repel cyber threats and support marketing efforts. But the problem is that such factors like host configuration problems, malware exposure, connected domains, and so on, can affect your domain reputation and must, therefore, be thoroughly investigated before they get out of hand.

You can handle these issues manually one by one, or you can get a comprehensive assessment of your domain reputation through a domain reputation API service. The latter allows you to test a domain through multiple parameters—most of which are scrutinized across several feeds coming from major data sources plus an external configuration audit procedure using threat intelligence. The result is a composite safety score with several practical applications.

Keep an Eye on Your Domain Reputation

Why would you want to do so? Regularly tracking your domain reputation is essential because of the rapidly-changing nature of attacks. Periodic checks on your systems are required to assess their vulnerability to emerging dangers and, as a result, to keep your domain reputation score high.

Maintaining a positive rating is also a major factor in ensuring the delivery of your emails. Messages sent out from domains with low reputation may not make it to the inbox, eroding the results of your marketing initiatives or lead to customer dissatisfaction when transactional emails are not received.

On top of that, a domain reputation API allows evaluating and fixing mail server configuration issues, thus raising your deliverability profile and facilitating the uninterrupted flow of communication to and from your organization.

Check the Safety of Other Domains

While maintaining a positive domain reputation score, it is equally important for organizations to use a domain reputation API to oversee the ratings of the domains that they interact with to make sure that they can be trusted.

One reason is that this can help companies save time and money by reducing the risk of potential threats. For instance, employees can efficiently pay attention to the safety of the websites they deal with, mitigating the dangers of interacting with malicious sources. C-level decision makers can also use the information to guide them in making safe investments and acquisitions.

But the technique is also relevant for the following reasons:

• Protection from dangerous domains – Huge losses result from data breaches when you interact with fraudsters. Checking for domain reputation allows you to monitor the flow of data traffic and avoid potentially malicious domains.
• Assistance in forensic investigations – Domains deemed dubious due to their domain reputation scores can provide leads into their malicious activities and cohorts.
• Safeguarding e-commerce operations – The practice of making automatic domain-to-domain transactions can be disastrous when dealing with dangerous domains. A check with an entity’s domain reputation can prevent such costly mishaps.

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Your domain reputation can enhance your business profile and help you score points on the Web. You can individually review the different parameters that combine and build your domain reputation score, or you can use the Domain Reputation API to simultaneously check external hosts as part of a comprehensive cybersecurity risk profile.