Defaults Exposed makes A-Grade Playbook free for Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Defaults Exposed is offering its A-Grade Playbook free through Oct. 31, 2026, giving domain owners a fast security scan and step-by-step fixes for DNS and email protections. The move comes as the census says most domains still fail basic checks and remain vulnerable to spoofed email and business email compromise.

Why it matters: - Domain security gaps still leave most businesses exposed to spoofed email, fraudulent invoices and account takeover attempts. - Defaults Exposed says its free playbook can help owners fix issues in the right order, without needing signup, a card or technical guesswork. - The offer lands during Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the U.S. and European Cybersecurity Month in the EU.

What happened: - Defaults Exposed is making its A-Grade Playbook free through Oct. 31, 2026, with one playbook available per domain. - The free offer is available at the free playbook page. - A domain owner enters a domain and an email address at that domain, confirms the email that arrives and receives the playbook within seconds. - The underlying scan is free, takes about a second and requires no signup.

The details: - The playbook tells a domain owner what is broken, why it matters, what to fix first and the exact records to paste. - The guide includes the click-path for the owner’s DNS host and mail console. - The playbook sequences fixes in a safe order, with lower-risk changes first and mail delivery last. - The playbook names tripwires and re-checks the domain up to 10 times as changes go in. - Defaults Exposed says every fix is documented free on the site, one check at a time. - The monthly census grades all available domains across all available top-level domains. - The September 2026 census found 74.2% of domains scored an F on published checks covering SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC, TLS and web security headers. - Only 0.2% scored an A. - Only 24.8% published a DMARC record, which tells receiving mail servers what to do with forged mail. - More than half of those DMARC records, 53.3%, used p=none, which delivers suspicious mail as normal. - Defaults Exposed says 88.4% of domains do nothing to stop an email that claims to come from their domain. - Since the single-domain scanner launched in July, thousands of domains have been scanned by owners and operators, and hundreds have been rescanned more than once. - Roughly one in six rescanned domains moved from a failing grade to a passing one between scans. - The fastest confirmed repair took 14 minutes, when an operator turned on DKIM signing and three security headers and rescanned. - Another domain moved from an F at 58% to an A at 90% in 12 hours. - On the census scale, F is below 60% and A is 90% or above. - HTTP security headers were the most common fix, followed by DNSSEC and then SPF. - DMARC was the least applied fix, though several domains moved their policy from p=none to quarantine or reject. - The latest census says 317 million domains were sourced in September 2026.

Between the lines: - The playbook targets the step many owners avoid: moving from basic checks to stricter email enforcement. - DMARC remains the hardest lift, but it is also the control most directly tied to blocking forged email. - The rescans show that many fixes are practical and fast once owners know what to change. - The free offer is also a lead-generation moment for Defaults Exposed, but the underlying security problem is real and measurable.

What's next: - Owners can claim the free playbook until Oct. 31, 2026. - Defaults Exposed is directing readers to its methodology, explore page and stats page for more data. - The organization says its monthly census will continue grading published DNS, email authentication and web transport security across the domains it can source. - The FBI logged 24,768 business email compromise complaints in 2025, with reported losses of $3.05 billion, underscoring why email authentication remains a priority. - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft now require SPF, DKIM and DMARC from high-volume senders, increasing the cost of failing these checks.

The bottom line: - The free playbook is a limited-time push to help domain owners close common security gaps before they turn into fraud, delivery failures or rejected mail.