Webmail giants Google, Microsoft, Yahoo teamed up with Facebook and others to lay down standards for an anti phishing. The alliance formed by these companies is known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC for short).
What is phishing?
Phishing is way of stealing sensitive information from unsuspecting users through email spoofing, the phishing email messages pose as they came from legitimate businesses and directs users to enter personal information in web pages identical to the legitimate ones.
Most of these phishing scams end up in Spam folders of webmail accounts, but average users might think that it may be legitimate and click on those phishing mails.
PayPal is also involved in the group, and PayPal is now blocking around 200,000 fake PayPal messages each day by working with Gmail and Yahoo Mail. With the new standard in place lot of fake messages from other sites can be blocked from entering users email boxes.
The DMARC protocols are based on existing technologies, including the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Both are common mail security protocols. SPF verifies the IP address of the email’s sender, while DKIM vets the structure of the email’s content, comparing it to encoded information coming from the sender.
If things work as they planned and everyone cooperates we might see an improved spam free webmail system soon. But sometimes spammers are on step ahead and find ways to circumvent these technologies.
Via Wired
