New anti-phishing alliance formed

2012-02-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

Big players in email service/technology industry come together to develop standards to combat spam and phishing.

A new alliance has been formed by the biggest players in the email service/technology industry to help combat spam and phishing. A total of 15 companies, including Microsoft, PayPal, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, AOL and Yahoo!, have come together to develop new standards to help curb the problem of fraudulent mail. The alliance has been named ‘Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance’, or DMARC, and has already produced a draft specification that helps to formalize and automate message authentication processes.

Although a number of forms of email authentication exist – such as SPF, DKIM and SenderID, there is currently no common standard. The DMARC framework aims to provide a more comprehensive and integrated way for email senders to introduce email authentication technologies into their infrastructure. Once it has gathered some data from usage of the technology in the field, DMARC intends to submit the specification to the IETF for standardization.

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