Thursday, October 04, 2007

Always a bigger phish

Who exactly falls for email scams? Obviously someone does. The BBC says that "In 2005 UK losses from phishing scams stood at £23.2m." I'm probably setting myself up for a fall - and if I am, you have my full permission to point and go "ha, ha" when it happens - but I've not yet fallen for a phish and I can't imagine anyone I know doing so either.

My guess is that it's not the reasonably techno-savvy who pay up. It's the grannies out there who have just got their first computer and are justly proud of finally piercing the technology barrier. £23.2m = lots of grannies.

Today eBay and Paypal are the first two big names to sign up to Yahoo's DKIM system, which uses public and private key encryption to weed out the frauds. Now, stop me if I'm missing something, but ... "in order for the technology to work, both the sender and recipient need their mail services to be signed up to DKIM."

The spammers won't be signing up and neither will the grannies. So, really not sure how this solves anything.

2 comments:

  1. I think the idea is that neither the spammers nor the grannies need to be signed up. Ebay and paypal are sending mail with DKIM encrypted signatures then only mail that yahoo receives from trusted domains is accepted. I guess they will want to extend it too all email services so whatever email the granny has they will be protected. Is that how its meant to work?

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  2. Ah! I thought I was probably being slow. Yes - all the companies involved sign up. That should do it.

    What the grannies do about the mass viagra mailings is another matter.

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