Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! to fight e-mail spam

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and Facebook are setting aside their online rivalry to fight a common enemy: e-mail spam and “phishing” attacks.

The web giants said they have teamed up with Bank of America, PayPal and others to combat spam and phishing, where e-mails seeking to obtain passwords or other information are sent to unsuspecting recipients.

Following 18 months of private collaboration, they announced the formation of a technical working group known as DMARC.org, drawn from the acronym for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.

“Email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in e-mail and the internet as a whole,” Brett McDowell, the chair ofDMARC.org, said in a statement.

“Industry cooperation – combined with technology and consumer education – is crucial to fight phishing,” said McDowell, the senior manager of customer security initiatives at PayPal.

The members of DMARC are proposing e-mail authentication standards for e-mail senders and receivers designed to make impersonation more difficult for the fraudsters behind phishing attacks.

Currently, e-mail providers must rely on “complex and imperfect measurements to separate legitimate unauthenticated messages sent by the domain owner from fraudulent phishing messages sent by a scammer,” DMARC said.

“By introducing a standards-based framework, DMARC has defined a more comprehensive and integrated way for e-mail senders to introduce e-mail authentication technologies into their infrastructure,” it said.

AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, the leading e-mail providers, are members of DMARC.orgalong with Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, PayPal, American Greetings, Facebook, LinkedIn and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and Trusted Domain Project.