Is Yahoo supposed to be good at blocking junk mail or other things created
by bots?  I get 10 spam emails for every good email in my Yahoo inbox.  IMO,
Yahoo spam filters are the worst of any of the freemail services.  We all
know the countless bots that spam and clog up Yahoo Chat Rooms and Yahoo
Messenger.  I think Yahoo needs to figure out how to block bots from getting
new Yahoo addresses which would dramatically stop the flow of spam/spim to
people.

But the good news is that I guess Yahoo can only get better and PayPal and
eBay certainly should do something to help block the countless phishing
emails sent posing as them.  I'm just not sure if Yahoo is who should be
doing it.  LOL

Lenny Vasbinder 504-621-1870
 
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computer.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Linda A.
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2007 11:13 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Y!M] Yahoo, eBay work to block phishing

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O), is working with auction leader
eBay Inc (EBAY.O) and its PayPal payments unit to block fake e- mails to
users purporting to be from eBay and PayPal, hoping to spur on an industry
that has been slow to fight the scourge of so-called phishing attacks. 

EBay and PayPal have upgraded their computer systems to support an emerging
technology standard known as DomainKeys invented by Yahoo that authenticates
e-mail senders are who they say they are, allowing Yahoo to block fake
e-mails.

The technology upgrade will be made available to Yahoo Mail users worldwide
over the next several weeks, the company said.

"It is a big step forward for consumers in defense against the bad guys,"
John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said in a phone interview.

Along with banks and pharmaceutical makers, eBay and PayPal are among the
brands most targeted by phishers seeking to trick consumers into divulging
personal information such as credit card or password data in order to commit
financial fraud.

Over the past decade, phishing has been clogging the inboxes of e- mail
users worldwide with ever more sophisticated attempts to fool users into
clicking on fraudulent sites or giving up personal financial details to
commit fraud.

But to date, many of the defenses put forward by security software vendors
and industry consortiums have failed to take hold with e-mail senders due to
their complexity or costliness, or political in- fighting over standards,
leaving individual consumers always guessing which e-mail may be real or
fake.

A PayPal official said Yahoo's system provides a way of automatically
detecting potential phishing attacks without relying on the consumer to do
anything new.

"If the consumer doesn't receive an email in their inbox then it is very
hard for the phisher to victimize them," Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief
information security officer. 

FEAR OF BLOCKING LEGITIMATE E-MAIL

Two camps have emerged among technology providers seeking to develop a
coherent approach to identifying e-mail senders.

One backed by Yahoo and Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO.O) along with AOL, Google
Inc (GOOG.O), International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), Sendmail and
VeriSign Inc (VRSN.O) is the DomainKeys Identified Mail
(DKIM) technology, which allows e-mail providers to identify the Web domain
from which a sender has sent e-mail.

A second standard known as Sender Policy Network (SPF) has been led by
Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), which offers its own version of SPF known as Sender
ID. SPF-based protections are used by Amazon, AOL, GoDaddy and eBay, which
supports both DKIM and SPF.

Chenxi Wang, a security analyst with Forrester Research, said DomainKeys
relies on more sophisticated cryptography than the Microsoft-supported
approach. This sophistication can make DomainKeys harder for Web sites to
install but offers greater long-term defense against phishing attacks, she
said.

So far, most customers have installed sender authentication inside their
e-mail systems as a monitoring tool but do not block e-mail for fear of
false positives -- mistakenly treating legitimate customer e- mail messages
as phishing attempts.

However, despite the industry disagreements, an underlying consensus is
emerging among software vendors, Internet service providers and corporate
Web sites that digital e-mail signing in one form or another is the best
shot to combat phishing.

"Two years ago if you asked companies whether they were using e-mail
authentication, most people wouldn't have cared," Wang said. "Today if you
ask most organizations if they think it is a good thing people would say,
'Yes."'

"The industry is slowly coming around," Wang said. "EBay and PayPal are some
of the first to actively block unauthenticated e-mails."



No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.488 / Virus Database: 269.13.39/1045 - Release Date: 10/2/2007
6:43 PM
 



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