Anti-Phishing Working Group chart
Greg Lamm
Staff Writer- Puget Sound Business Journal
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Everybody’s gotten them, those emails that at first glance look like they are from your bank seeking your password and bank account numbers.
Often the emails are disguised with bank logos and official-sounding wording. But they are actually email “phishing” scams seeking to crack into our bank records and steal our money.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other email providers are working with banks to try to stay one step ahead of the scammers.
Microsoft and the others are proposing a system called “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance,” according to The Associated Press.
According to its website, DMARC.org standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication:
This means that senders will experience consistent authentication results for their messages at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and any other email receiver implementing DMARC. We hope this will encourage senders to more broadly authenticate their outbound email which can make email a more reliable way to communicate.
Altogether, 15 email service and technology providers have joined forces to form DMARC.org, a technical working group developing standards for reducing the threat of deceptive emails.
Others on board include Bank of America
, Fidelity Investments, PayPal and social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, on any given month more than 300 brands are hijacked by phishing scams.
Banks are targeted about half the time, with payment services targeted another 25 percent of the time, according to APWG’s phishing activity report for the first half of 2011.
The report states that there are “thousands of fake phishing websites established online every day, luring any number of consumers to trouble and loss.”
Greg Lamm covers banking finance and law for the Puget Sound Business Journal.
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