GMail Partners With Ebay and Paypal to Fight Phishing

Phishing is a very big problem on the net, and Ebay and Paypal are the two biggest targets. Everyday scammers send hundreds of thousands of phishing emails claiming to be from these net giants. The goal is to fool people into giving up their personal info so that the phisher can drain their bank accounts, hijack their ebay accounts, and more. Yesterday Gmail announced they have partnered with Ebay and Paypal in the fight against these scammers. The weapon of choice is Domain Keys and DomainKeys Identified Mail. From now on Ebay and Paypal will sign all emails coming from their domains, and as a result, Gmail will automatically reject any that are not authenticated-the users will never even know they were sent.

Here is an excerpt from their announcement:

           Now any email that claims to come from “paypal.com” or “ebay.com” (and their international versions) is authenticated by Gmail and — here comes the important part — rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay. That’s right: you won’t even see the phishing message in your spam folder. Gmail just won’t accept it at all. Conversely, if you get an message in Gmail where the “From” says “@paypal.com” or “@ebay.com,” then you’ll know it actually came from PayPal or eBay. It’s email the way it should be.

Will this have phishers shaking in their boots? That’s unlikely, simply because DKIM authentication hasn’t been widely adopted by ISPs, so even though they may have no luck with Gmail users, there are still a lot of other fish in the sea. However, spammers and scammers are always looking at ways to get around filters and crack authentication features, so it’s a good bet they are already working on ways to fake DomainKeys authentication. For now though, Gmail, Ebay and Paypal can pat themselves on the back for doing all they can to protect their domains and their customers!