Monday 30 January 2012

Email providers work together to stop phishing

Information Week reports that the big free Email-service providers Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL Inc., along with financial service companies Bank of America and Paypal, are backing a new effort intended to dramatically reduce "phishing" emails which attempt to trick recipients into thinking they come from a legitimate source. To achieve that, the firms have created DMARC.org, a working group of 15 companies that plans to promote a standard set of technologies that they say will lead to more secure email, making email more trustworthy and phishing more difficult.
Besides email providers and financial-service firms, initial participants include social-networking companies such as Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. and messaging-security providers such as Agari Data Inc. DMARC chairman Brett McDowell says it won't cost a lot for companies to start using the standards, but it will require them to identify every server that sends email and ensure that the technologies are in use. The same holds true for third-party firms such as marketing agencies that send email on behalf of a company.

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