Yahoo, eBay take steps to block phishing attacks

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc, is working with auction leader eBay Inc 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.