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::TECHNOLOGY NEWS::
LE Newsletter - February 2, 2012
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Microsoft, Google Push New Plan To Combat E-Mail Scams
Source:
www.globeandmail.com - Reuters
(Jan 30, 2012) Boston— Some of the world’s
biggest Internet
companies
and financial services firms have developed a new approach to
fighting
e-mail spam
that they hope will reduce online scams.
Facebook, Google Inc. GOOG-Q and Microsoft Corp. MSFT-Q have
joined with financial firms Bank of America Corp BAC-N.,
Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc.’s EBAY-Q PayPal to create a
set of industry standards for preventing criminals from sending
out spam emails that appear to come from corporate e-mail
addresses.
Fraudsters often pose as banks and other trusted firms in
attempts to persuade e-mail recipients to provide payment card
numbers, bank account information and other personal data or
click on links that infect computers with malicious software.
The new approach calls for email providers and businesses to
attack spammers by coordinating on a massive scale the use of
two existing technologies for e-mail authentication known by the
acronyms SPF and DKIM, which have yet to be widely adopted.
PayPal is one company that currently uses SPF (Sender Policy
Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) technology
standards to fight email spoofing, but only through partnerships
with Yahoo Inc. YHOO-Q and Google, said Brett McDowell, a
security manager at PayPal who serves as chairman of the group
that developed the new standard.
The group goes by the name DMARC.org, which stands for
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.
If Yahoo or Google get an e-mail claiming to come from PayPal
that is not properly authenticated with SPF or DKIM, the email
is not delivered, he said. But if fraudsters send spoofed PayPal
e-mail to other e-mail providers, it might get through.
“What we need is an Internet standard that allows this level of
protection to work at scale - without any discussion, without
any partner agreements,” Mr. McDowell said. “That is what DMARC
does.”
Other companies involved in the group include American Greetings
Corp. AM-N, LinkedIn Corp. LNKD-N and Yahoo as well as privately
held Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and the Trusted Domain
Project.
IDC security analyst Michael Versace said that the approach
recommended by the group appeared to be effective and
inexpensive to implement.
Yet he said that the industry should keep developing new
technologies to fight spammers because he expects that cyber
criminals will eventually figure out how to circumvent the DMARC
protections. |
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::ENTERTAINMENT NEWS WITH A CANADAN TWIST::
