A .BANK domain is an affordable protection against phishing, the #1 cyberattack and starting point of most breaches. Breaches and phishing hit all-time records in 2017, and 2018 is expected to be worse. With Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, bad actors are gathering more data to create increasingly convincing phishing emails, and are sending the attacks to exponentially more bank employees and customers. With the increasing volume and sophistication of these attacks, it is critical to educate all employees and customers on how to identify phishing emails and spoofed sites, so they do not accidentally click through and provide access to sensitive information for use in financial crimes, identity theft and breaches.

.BANK is your online stamp of trust, a simpler, quicker, more thorough way to educate employees and customers and protect them against cyberattacks. As a verified domain, bad actors simply cannot get a domain or email address that looks like yours to impersonate you and phish your employees and customers. In common domains (e.g., .com) it is possible for anyone to purchase a domain that looks nearly identical to yours using a variety of alphabets, misspellings, numbers in place of letters, or one that seems it could belong to your bank (e.g., [bankname]security.com). In common domains the security of your bank relies heavily on your employees’ and customers’ abilities to recognize and report these domains and emails. A .BANK domain permits you to operate in a gated community of banks, giving you a visual cue customers can recognize and a simple educational message “If it’s .BANK, it’s us.”.