PayPal Seeking New Security Against Phishing

by , 3:55 PM EDT, March 27th, 2007

PayPal is asking Internet e-mail providers for their cooperation in a new technology to deter phishing scams, according to InfoWorld on Tuesday.

The technology, called DomainKeys, was developed by Yahoo Inc. It allows the verification of the sender and the integrity of the sent message. If bogus, a message that might have otherwise passed a filter test, will be blocked.

Increasingly sophisticated phishing scams often appear to be sent from Internet banking sites, like PayPal, but are really from sites, often outside the U.S., that seek to obtain "verification" data, that is a user's account name and password.

"So far, no agreements have been reached, but the idea is one that PayPal would like to see from other e-commerce businesses," said Joseph E. Sullivan, PayPal's associate general counsel recently. "I think one lesson we've learned is that education isn't going to stop this.... Phishing attacks are too good now. Every company that does business on the Internet is being targeted by phishing scams now."

TMO tip: In Apple Mail, place the cursor over any suspicious URL that appears to redirect to a Website. A yellow box will reveal the true URL, which will likely be different that shown in the e-mail if it's a scam. If it shows a strange, foreign, or dotted quad IP in the root, it's very likely a scam.