We& 39;ve seen popular website band together to squash cyber-squatters. This time, they& 39;re working to fight phishing.
Information Week reports that Yahoo!, PayPal and eBay have initiated a campaign to keep phishers away from Yahoo! Mail account holders.
Hold the phone. Just what is phishing anyway?
Basically, phishing is a form of identity theft. Phishers mass distribute fake e-mail messages that appear to be from authentic sites such as eBay or PayPal. What for? To "dupe computer users into clicking on Web links that lead to phony websites."
From there, people are likely to enter "personal or account information and passwords under false pretenses." With these pieces of sensitive information, phishers can commit identity fraud or theft.
Okay... so what are these companies doing about it?
To combat this threat, Yahoo!, PayPal and eBay have begun to utilize Yahoo& 39;s Domain Keys technology to block counterfeit e-mail messages such as these. The feature is currently only available in the U.S but "Yahoo expects to make the system available globally in the next few weeks."
The combined services of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Cisco(CSCO)& 39;s Identified Internet Mail system scan varying criteria of an outgoing message to ensure its address and origin are in sync.
Information Week mentioned that in June of this year the Anti-Phishing Working Group, "a consortium of organizations opposed to cyber crime, reported 31,709 unique phishing Web sites."
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