Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and others join forces to fight spam and phishing attacks
Brett McDowell, DMARC.org’s chairman and a senior manager at PayPal, said in a statement that “email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the Internet as a whole.”
LONDON, UK – 15 major technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL, are joining forces to fight against email spam and “phishing” attacks, it was announced Monday.
The Internet giants are teaming up with Bank of America, PayPal and others to improve authentication and tackle scams that try to trick users into giving away passwords or other personal information through official-looking emails.
After a year and a half of private collaboration, the companies today announced the formation of a technical working group called DMARC.org, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, the AFP reported.
The group’s members have released plans to establish a “feedback loop” between email receivers and senders, and are proposing agreed standards for authenticating emails sent to web users holding AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail email accounts, to make impersonation harder for those behind phishing attacks.
Email security companies Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and the Trusted Domain Project are also taking part in the initiative, according to the Associated Press.
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Brett McDowell, DMARC.org’s chairman and a senior manager at PayPal, said in a statement that “email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the Internet as a whole.”
“Industry cooperation – combined with technology and consumer education – is crucial to fight phishing,” he added.
The initiative marks the first serious attempt at bringing email and service providers as well as key security organisations together, the BBC reports.
According to DMARC.org, its industry-wide involvement, covering senders, intermediaries and receivers of email use, will for the first time enable email providers to reliably filter out unwanted messages, rather than relying on “complex and imperfect measurements” to determine threats.
It is hoped that more companies will join the open standard as it is developed.
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