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PayPal Calls For Partnerships Against Phishing
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-04-14
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
One of the most popular phishing targets on the Internet wants to thwart criminals, but needs a lot of help to do so.
Stamping out phishing won't happen with one company pushing for a fix. Payment processor and eBay component PayPal needs cooperation to accomplish this.
"We know we're always going to be an attractive target for criminals. But what I don't want is PayPal to be protected and the rest of the industry not. Phishing could be solved, there's no need for it to happen," PayPal chief info security officer said at a security conference recently.
Phishing for PayPal details happens on an immense scale. A report at Silicon.com said Yahoo's efforts to block PayPal-related messages alone kept 50 million phishes out of Yahoo Mail since last fall.
That happened thanks to digital signatures appended to PayPal's legitimate messages. When a phish lacking that signature hits Yahoo, the message gets tossed.
Microsoft received some credit from Barrett, as the company's Internet Explorer 7 browser may be helping stop people from going to phishing sites thanks to its anti-phishing technologies. (Firefox and Opera also carry phishing protection in their browsers.)
Phishing persists as a standby for criminals. Through the use of botnets, phishers send out millions of messages. It doesn't take many to make the crime profitable, as the distributed nature of spamming this way costs the phishers little.
Couple that with how the phishing types tend to be hiding out in countries where effective prosecution against computer crime is a pipe dream for security pros at best, and one can see where Barrett is coming from with his call for more partnerships against phishing activities.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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