Yahoo, EBay target fake e-mails

Yahoo Inc. is working with auction leader EBay Inc. and its PayPal payments unit to block fake e-mails to users purporting to be from EBay and PayPal, hoping to spur on an industry that has been slow to fight so-called phishing attacks.

EBay and PayPal have upgraded their computer systems to support an emerging technology standard known as DomainKeys invented by Yahoo that authenticates e-mail senders are who they say they are, allowing Yahoo to block fake e-mails. The technology upgrade will be made available to Yahoo Mail users worldwide over the next several weeks, the company said.

Along with banks and pharmaceutical makers, EBay and PayPal are among the brands most targeted by phishers seeking to trick consumers into divulging personal information such as credit card or password data in order to commit financial fraud.

Many of the defenses put forward by security software vendors and industry consortia have failed to take hold with e-mail senders because of their complexity or costliness or because of political infighting over standards, leaving individual consumers to guess which e-mail may be real or fake.