Security

Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal Rally Against E-mail Fraud and Phishing

Great Secuity Measure to be deployed

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

9th of October 2007, 10:55 GMT

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This is something great - these giants have joined forces to put an end to e-mail frauds and phishing scams. It's bound to have great results - Yahoo! Mail is going to protect consumers by blocking fraudulent eBay and PayPal e-mail and with their e-mail client being the most popular ever, this is going to thwart cyber-crime!

Yahoo! Mail is the first web mail service to block these types of malicious messages for eBay and PayPal through the use of DomainKeys e-mail authentication technology. Every time giants have teamed up, us consumers

were the ones that got the benefits, and this is just another example in that direction. So, now, if using Yahoo! Mail you'll be safer by default - this is great! This new technology upgrade will hit global Yahoo! Mail users over the next several weeks.

"eBay and PayPal's adoption of e-mail authentication technology and this aggressive move on the part of Yahoo! Mail are significant steps forward in the fight to protect consumers against e-mail-based crimes," said Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal, a few days ago. "While there is clearly no silver bullet for solving the problems of phishing and identity theft, today's announcement is great news for our customers who rely on Yahoo! Mail."

"By reducing the risk of phishing scams, Yahoo! Mail now offers a much safer Web mail service for eBay and PayPal users, and this protection will benefit the larger Yahoo! Mail community as well," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo! Mail. "We look forward to helping to facilitate continued industry adoption of DomainKeys and the proposed standard DomainKeys Identified Mail, as we continue to increase our efforts to safeguard the inbox."

DomainKeys have been developed by Yahoo! and they address e-mail forgery, using cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. With DomainKeys whitelisting and blacklisting become more efficient as they allow e-mail providers to validate an e-mail's originating domain. They also make phishing attacks easier to detect by helping identify abusive domains. See more about them here.

"Today is a significant milestone for the added protection of millions of eBay and PayPal customers," said Dave Cullinane, chief information security officer at eBay several days ago. "Through industry cooperation, we can collectively try to stamp out phishing and other e-mail scams. We welcome Yahoo!'s commitment to this endeavor, applaud its leadership role within the Internet service provider community, and encourage others join in the fight to keep consumers safe from phishing attacks."

I think that this is something great that should have happened some time ago; I can hardly wait to see what security experts will have to report in a few months. I'm betting that the rate of e-mail frauds and phishing will go down, with this new solution and I sincerely hope that more companies out there will pick up similar initiatives! Way to go, Yahoo!, eBay and Paypal!

TAGS:

Yahoo! | eBay | PayPal | security

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