Google, Facebook and Microsoft team up to combat Phishing
on January 30th, 2012 
Internet companies Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and several others have teamed up with financial firms Bank of America Corp, Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc’s PayPal to develop a new system to fight phishing.
During phishing attacks, cybercriminals often pose as banks and other trusted firms in attempts to persuade email recipients to provide payment card numbers, bank account information and other personal data or click on links that infect computers with malicious software. Through this alliance, which is known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance(DMARC), the companies plan to create a set of industry standards for preventing criminals from sending out spam emails that appear to come from corporate email addresses.
The new approach requires email providers and businesses to attack spammers by using two existing technologies for email authentication known by the acronyms SPF and DKIM.
Phishing messages are often caught by an email client’s spam filters. But many users end up opening the message that says it’s from PayPal. Adam Dawes, a Google product manager and DMARC representative points out that DMARC’s idea is to get the email companies working behind the scenes to prevent phishing emails from ever hitting your inbox or spam folder.
“What we need is an Internet standard that allows this level of protection to work at scale – without any discussion, without any partner agreements,” said Brett McDowell, one of PayPal’s security managers and now chairman of DMARC.
PayPal started working with Google and Yahoo to set standards for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail that would prevent fake PayPal messages from reaching a user’s inbox. According to the three companies, they were blocking over 200,000 fake PayPal messages each day. After experiencing some level of success in this initiative, the companies started asking other outfits to get involved.
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