Yahoo Mail Adds Phishing Protection
Yahoo, eBay and Paypal have announced a new collaboration which aims to protect e-mail users from the ever increasing number of phishing scams on the web. Yahoo Mail users should see a reduction in the number of fake e-mails claiming to come from eBay and PayPal.
Yahoo Mail is first major web mail service to block these types of malicious messages for eBay and PayPal. Behind the scenes Yahoo Mail is using a new technology dubbed “DomainKeys Identified Mail” (DKIM) which forces incoming messages to authenticate themselves. The DKIM technology uses encrypted digital signatures to prove a message’s origin.
Since the fraudulent messages look like they come from the eBay or PayPal domains, many people are fooled into clicking through and revealing username and password details. However, DomainKeys isn’t interested in looks, it requires the e-mail to authenticate itself. If it fails to do so, it will never reach your Yahoo Mail inbox.
While the new Yahoo Mail filters are good news for users, they’re no substitute for common sense.
A quick glance at my own junk mailbox (GMail) reveals two PayPal scam e-mails, but also seven similarly structured e-mails purporting to be from major banking institutions — all scams. As your bank (and eBay and PayPal) almost always say, repeatedly, and often in bold type: Don’t respond to unsolicited e-mails. These scams only work because we fall for them, be smart people.
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