Valimail’s Director of Industry, Seth Blank, Initiatives Brings Years of Experience and Dedication to Collaborative Solutions to Industry Group

Valimail, the world’s only provider of fully automated email authentication, announced that the company’s director of industry initiatives, Seth Blank, has been named co-chair of the M3AAWG Collaboration Committee.

M3AAWG is the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group, a technology-neutral, non-political working body founded in 2004 to focus on operational issues of Internet abuse, including spam, phishing, viruses, bots, and more. M3AAWG has more than 200 member companies, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telecom companies, Email Service Providers (ESPs), social networking companies, leading hardware and software vendors, major brands, major antivirus vendors, and numerous security vendors. M3AAWG members represent nearly two billion inboxes and the organization’s work has been responsible for both greatly curtailing spam and supporting the development and evangelizing email authentication technologies such as SPF and DKIM, and the anti-impersonation technology DMARC.

“Fighting abuse of the Internet’s open infrastructure and open standards is essential today, when we’re seeing an unprecedented surge of phishing, email impersonation, ransomware, business email compromise, and more,” said Blank. “The most effective way to combat this kind of abuse is for the industry to come together and agree on collaborative, cooperative ways of ensuring trust and drive those mechanisms to adoption. M3AAWG has been successful in this role for years, and I’m excited to help carry the torch forward.”

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Since Valimail’s founding in 2015, it has been an active participant within M3AAWG, and the company views contributing to the organization’s nonpartisan, vendor-neutral mission as an important corporate obligation that goes hand in hand with Valimail’s open source and standards work, which Blank also heads.

As co-chair of the M3AAWG Collaboration Committee, Blank will seek to incorporate different viewpoints and cross-industry representation in facilitating the committee’s development of best common practice documents, open roundtables and panels, and industry outreach. Blank will also help recruit new member organizations and will be actively soliciting new viewpoints to contribute to the vibrant, collaborative culture in M3AAWG.

Blank’s mission as the director of industry initiatives at Valimail is to strengthen and extend email authentication in a vendor-neutral way. In the past year, he has played a key role in broad industry standards such as ARC, and has also contributed to collaborative work with the US Department of Homeland Security, the Online Trust Alliance, and the Global Cyber Alliance, as well as M3AAWG. This position with M3AAWG is a natural extension of that work.

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“We appreciate Valimail’s ongoing participation in M3AAWG and are pleased to see Seth selected by the M3AAWG Board as a Collaboration Committee co-chair,” said M3AAWG Executive Director Jerry Upton. “As a collaborative organization, it’s the committees that drive our work — and the collaboration committee is the cornerstone of many important projects. We are looking forward to Seth’s contributions.”

Blank joins Valimail’s CTO and co-founder Peter Goldstein, who is already the co-chair of the M3AAWG Technical Committee. These two co-chairmanships underscore Valimail’s commitment to lifting up the messaging industry as a whole and working collaboratively with partners throughout the ecosystem to restore trust to email.

Email impersonation is the top vector through which cybercriminals attack organizations today. Between 90 and 95 percent of all cyber attacks begin with phishing emails (usually categorized as “social engineering”), and the majority of phishing attacks use impersonation techniques, where the sender fakes or “spoofs” the From address to make it look like it comes from someone the recipient trusts. Valimail’s unique approach to stopping email impersonation is built on an automated, standards-based platform that has been winning accolades for its effectiveness and speed of implementation.

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