About The Author

Ken Takahashi

Ken Takahashi joined Return Path in 2006 to launch the company’s international growth efforts and has since overseen the company’s global channel partner business and was named Vice President of Corporate Development in 2010. He currently leads the anti-phishing services team and also heads up our emerging markets team, which is responsible for developing opportunities for Return Path to expand into new products, geographies and market segments.

He joined Return Path from DoubleClick’s email division (which was later acquired by Epsilon) where he served as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships responsible for global partnerships. He also ran the industry’s first international email deliverability team located throughout North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. The start of his email industry tenure began at MessageMedia, an early era email service provider, over a decade ago. He has spent a majority of that time fighting spam and advocating on behalf of legitimate online marketing communities around the world.

Ken has been an active leader on the board of directors to the Online Trust Alliance, is a frequent industry speaker, editorial contributor, and advisor to companies in the email and interactive marketing space. He holds a Bachelors of Science degree from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University.

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On the Road for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

By Ken Takahashi
on Wednesday, October 3, 2012

It’s fitting that the Return Path team began what the Whitehouse presidential proclamation has declared “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” in San Jose, at the OTA’s Online Trust Forum. We’re here with some of the leading figures in cybersecurity, discussing ways to help marketing and security teams collaborate to protect their brands and their customers from fraud and abuse in their email streams.

In that vein we announced yesterday that we’ve strengthened our anti-phishing solution through an agreement with Symantec to leverage their trusted domain list. By incorporating this data to reduce false positives from the messages identified as suspicious, we made it easier and faster to find sources of abusive email.

The standard beneath technology like this is DMARC, which I spoke about here yesterday as a vital component of email brand protection. Return Path has been able to play a key role shaping and championing industry adoption of DMARC. Clearly it’s a central to our anti-phishing efforts, but the impact of DMARC extends far beyond our business. Broad adoption can make the entire email ecosystem safer and more secure – a goal that brings us together at events like the Online Trust Forum, and unites nearly every member of the online community.

I’ll be talking about these issues a lot more this month—this post is the first in a series on diagnosing, addressing, and preventing phishing attacks. We’re also taking our show on the road, attending the M3AAWG general meeting in Baltimore on October 22-25, and also the FS-ISAC Fall Summit in Lansdowne, MD on October 21-24.

I know I’ll see a number of you at these events, and I’m excited to hear your thoughts on the state of email security and your experience protecting your own brands and customers. So let me know if you’re headed to Maryland. Think of it as doing your part to uphold the ideals of National Cybersecurity Month.