Tag Archive: mail

Is there a computer user who hasn’t received an eBay or Paypal phishing e-mail? You know the ones, where there’s been a security violation and you need to follow the link and give all your account details. Except the link leads you to a spoof site, and your details are stolen.   Now eBay and its Paypal subsidiary are working with Yahoo with their anti-phishing technology. The key is known as DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM, which Yahoo is making available to its mail users very soon, and which might be expanded to eBay and Paypal.   It uses encrypted signatures to establish the sender of the e-mail. Currently, most spam mail is spoofed, that is fake addresses. They’re able to get away with that because mail serves generally only check whether the domain in the address exists.   With DKIM senders have to establish their identity by encrypting a key, or a tow-part signature, in part of the mail. Then the e-mail provider, puts another encrypted key into the mail that is linked to a key held in the Internet domain name system.   The big problem, though, is that both sender and recipient need to be signed up to DKIM for it all to work. But the signs are that momentum for DKIM is growing, as the Yahoo technology is backed by Sendmail, Verisign, AOL, IBM and Google.   With eBay and Paypal two of the most targeted companies for phishing mails, it makes sense for them to take the lead in this.