Gmail adds anti-phishing key icon for PayPal, eBay emails
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Google announced on its Gmail blog that users can get visual verification of the authenticity of emails from PayPal and eBay by turning on the authentication icon from the Labs tab under settings. Doing so attaches an icon that looks like a key to emails from these verified senders.
Gmail spam czar Brad Taylor said in the post that Google added extra protection last year for PayPal and eBay emails due to the high volume of phishing attacks targeting online payments from these services.
"We do that by looking at the 'From' header and when it says 'ebay.com' for example, it means it really did come from ebay.com. Anything else is rejected; it won't even appear in your spam folder because Gmail won't accept it," Taylor wrote.
With the addition of the key icon, Gmail users get the visual confirmation that the emails have been verified as "super-trustworthy," Taylor said.
The anti-phishing verification is limited to just eBay and PayPal right now, but Google hopes to add more senders to the pool of super-trustworthy email.
In antivirus vendor Symantec's July State of Phishing report, the company said phishing attacks increased by 21 percent in June, with 80 percent of phishing websites targeting the financial sector.
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