| Yahoo and eBay hook up on phisher blocker
Yahoo and eBay are joining forces to block phishing messages that specifically target PayPal users. EBay and its PayPal subsidiary will use Yahoo's DomainKeys technology to force email senders to prove who they are. DomainKeys works by verifying the domain of each email sender and the integrity of the messages sent. Yahoo claims that the system is designed to stop false positives, where genuine emails are blocked accidentally. "Once the domain can be verified, it can be compared to the domain used by the sender in the 'From' field of the message to detect forgeries," said a Yahoo statement. "If it is a forgery, then it is spam or fraud and can be dropped without impact to the user." Once a mail sender is verified as genuine, the system can be used to create a 'persistent reputation profile' which acts like a white-list in anti-spam policies and allows email from that source.
MIT hosts spam pow-wow
The fight against spam, phishing and email fraud should focus on economic incentives and aiding law enforcement, according attendees at a conference examining the problem this week. Speakers at MIT's 2006 Spam Conference were notably cognizant of the recent proposals of white lists and AOL's Goodmail, a pay per email service offering preferential treatment in email delivery for marketers. It is also one year since the implementation of Can-Spam, the federal law that sets email marketing standards and makes it less complicated for law enforcement to go after John Doe spammers. Many addressed these issues head on. Others proposed solutions that would clearly bypass the issue of email postage, or creating a hierarchy of email senders, an idea that goes against the internet's equalising spirit.
Sophos debuts a powerful new weapon in the fight against spam ...
IT security and control firm Sophos today announced the addition of Sophos eXtensible Lists (SXL) to its Email Security and Control solutions portfolio. SXL is an online look-up system that dramatically accelerates the distribution of anti-spam intelligence, moving away from traditional scheduled updates to a real-time system that provides quicker response to new and emerging spam campaigns. Sophos customers will receive this industry leading, rapid detection and deployment capability automatically. Rather than requiring the anti-spam engine to rely solely on local data when checking messages for spam, SXL enables real-time access to a wider range of information. It contains current and historical anti-spam intelligence such as IP addresses, URIs, message checksums, image/document fingerprints, etc.
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