Business
Yahoo, eBay and PayPal Fighting Against Phishing Email
Yahoo hopes to spur on an industry that has been slow to fight the scourge of so-called phishing attacks.
If you use Yahoo Mail you should be seeing a significant reduction in the number of e-mail scams purporting to be from eBay and PayPal very soon.
EBay and PayPal have upgraded their computer systems to support an emerging technology standard known as DomainKeys invented by Yahoo, designed to block phishing spam and other fraudulent e-mails that look like they come from eBay and PayPal but don’t. It works by authenticating e-mail senders are who they say they are, allowing Yahoo to block fake e-mails.
Yahoo will be upgrading its system beginning on Thursday with “DomainKeys”, the upgrade will be made available to Yahoo Mail users worldwide over the next several weeks, the company said.
“It is a big step forward for consumers in defense against the bad guys,” John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said in a phone interview.
Over the past decade, phishing has been clogging the inboxes of e-mail users worldwide with ever more sophisticated attempts to fool users into clicking on fraudulent sites or giving up personal financial details to commit fraud.
But to date, many of the defenses put forward by security software vendors and industry consortiums have failed to take hold with e-mail senders due to their complexity or costliness, or political in-fighting over standards, leaving individual consumers always guessing which e-mail may be real or fake.
A PayPal official said Yahoo’s system provides a way of automatically detecting potential phishing attacks without relying on the consumer to do anything new.
