Three of the worlds major technology-based corporations, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, have teamed up to fight phishing scams which take peoples personal information and use it maliciously.
It may not happen very often, but fooling others into getting their personal information is just downright wrong. Guess who just joined the fight? Your friendly neighbor hood corporations! According to Wired, they are Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and 11 other organizations.
Phishing is “a way of fooling email and web users into providing sensitive information, including credit card numbers.” First, the email is sent to your email saying you must enter your personal information for a certain website, but as most of us know, this is something we should never do via email. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have now joined a “new alliance to combat phishing.”
The alliance, called DMARC or “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance” is attempting to help companies modify email standards to help stop internet crimes from being committed. Usually these messages get caught in the SPAM or JUNK folder, but sometimes we take a look sometimes, but sometimes a message from PayPal or some other bank company can catch you off guard. You just have to open it. “Before they know it, someone has phished their credit card number.”
“About eighteen months ago, PayPal began working directly with Google and Yahoo to set standards for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail that would prevent fake PayPal messages from hitting a user’s inbox.” It’s not just PayPal though. These emails could claim to be your email provider or social network provider; and once you send them that sensitive information, you may not even be you anymore. But according to Mike Adkins, a Facebook messaging engineer, he states that “Monday’s news isn’t a “Coming soon” announcement. “You’ve been protected by DMARC for a while,” which is what we want and need.
DMARC isn’t the only alliance trying to combat phishing. Another group called the Anti-Phishing Working Group “encourages businesses to share the latest information about phishing tactics and techniques.”
At the moment, DMARC is trying to get rid of email phishing, and not “typo-phishing” which is when an internet user types in the wrong address and is mislead onto another “posing” website.
Phishing can turn your life around, so don’t open anything from your junk folder!
