Yahoo, Ebay and PayPal have joined forces to deploy a tool designed to protect users against fraudulent email scams, the companies announced.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), the new email authentication technology developed by Yahoo, uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender. It will immediately delete any “phishing” emails that purport to be a sender, before they ever hit the user’s inbox.

The technology will allow legitimate senders, in this case eBay and PayPal, to digitally sign all emails that it sends with a special cryptographic signature. When senders opt to use this technology, Yahoo can automatically block or delete any incoming e-mails that purport to be from the senders but do not have this special signature.

Nick Dugan, blog editor for Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog, said “[W]e hope today’s news gets the attention of information security officers at some of the more obvious phishing targets so we can help protect even more consumers from the havoc these scams wreak. We’re already actively working with many financial institutions, for example, and hope to continue the momentum.”

Dave Cullinane, chief information security officer at eBay, described the effort as a significant milestone in the effort to protect eBay and PayPal customers, Information Week wrote.

Likewise, Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, in a post on the PayPal Blog, also stressed that the company will be making similar arrangement with other service providers.

“There are about half a dozen large Internet service providers around the world which between them operate nearly fifty percent of the world’s e-mail addresses,” Barrett wrote. “We’re working with all of them to implement similar technology to what we announced with Yahoo!.”

While there is no single solution to eradicate the problems of phishing and identity theft, the move made by Yahoo, eBay and PayPal is considered a big step forward to protect consumers against fraudulent email scams.

The technology will be rolled out to all Yahoo Mail users over the next several weeks.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 8:47 pm under Scams, Security.

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
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