Online companies Yahoo and Ebay are targeting illegal e-mail scam, which is also called as Phishing, a worldwide security threat to online transactions. They are using a new technology called as Domain Keys developed by Yahoo to authenticate messages received online.  

Ebay, the global internet auctioning site and its affiliate PayPal are seeking to protect Yahoo mail users from e-mail that is posing as originating from them but are originating from elsewhere. Phishing as it is called leads Internet surfers to phony websites posing as Ebay and PayPal messages. Unsuspecting consumers enter their personal information into these phony sites and fall prey to fraud and theft.

In June, the Anti-Phishing Working group, a consortium of organizations opposed to cyber crime reported 31,709 unique Phishing websites. About 90% of phishing attacks targeted financial services companies.

The domain keys technology that is being used by Ebay and PayPal via Yahoo now blocks Phishing messages coming from fraudulent sites. Developed by Yahoo three years ago, Domain Keys makes use of cryptography to identify the domain name of the sender, which helps in blocking off phishing and spam mails.

Now, Yahoo, Paypal and Ebay are busy in the process of transitioning their systems from Domain Keys to the standard Domain Keys Identified Mail, which is expected to near completion in the next few months.

DKIM or Domain Keys Identified Mail technology as it is known, defines a domain level authentication for e-mail. A signing domain will take responsibility for every message sent and hence abusive domains will be easily identified. DKIM is poised to take the lead against phishing and spam worldwide.  

Others who are involved in DKIM technology include Cisco, Send Mail, PGP corp., IBM, Earthlink, Microsoft, Spamhaus, Google, Paypal and Alt-N.