PayPal Emphasizes Allowing Only Digitally Signed Messages

E-Bay-owned PayPal, an online payment system is persuading e-mail providers not to allow messages to pass that do not have digital signatures. PayPal is trying to convince that digital signatures aim to curtail phishing scams, said a company, which Computerworld published attorney on March 27, 2007.

PayPal is looking forward to various e-commerce businesses to adopt the idea though no agreements have been settled, said Joseph Sullivan, associate general counsel at PayPal. He was speaking at London's International E-Crime Congress. PCadvisor published this on March 28, 2007.

PayPal is now digitally signing its e-mails. The technology it is using for that is Domainkeys that Yahoo Inc. developed. Digital signature verifies the sender and the originality of his message.

For PayPal, phishing is an enormous challenge. Therefore, it's crucial for the money transfer system to identify fraudulent sites as early as possible so that its customers can be secured while providing their payment information.

Phishing has extracted large amounts from consumers and businesses' wallets. In 2006, such attacks resulted in $2.8 billion or more in financial drain. The top three phishing targets were PayPal, eBay and banks, according to a report by Gartner in late 2006. Gartner analyst Avivah Litan noted eBay as the central point for fraudsters to employ their malicious activities. RED HERRING published Litan's statement in the second week of March 2007.

According to Sullivan, phishing has come down worse than five years back when he started his association with eBay. He says while there has been improvement in spam filtering techniques and there is greater awareness about phishing, users are still the most vulnerable, falling prey to highly convincing tricks that use social engineering tactics.

Sullivan added that e-crime education would not stop all these problems around phishing because these attacks are getting too clever. phishing scams regularly target companies that do business online. PCadvisor published Sullivan's views on March 28, 2007.

Phishing sites are rising in numbers. The Anti-Phishing World Group, a body of vendors and government agencies released a report recently, which said there emerged 29,930 fraudulent websites in January this year, the largest number so far.

Related article: Paypal – Web Hosting Services Need To Work Hard To Tackle Phishing

» SPAMfighter News - 4/3/2007