Originally published February 21 2005
E-commerce giants cooperate to stop phishing attacks
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Phishing, the practice of sending fake e-mails that appear to come from legitimate e-commerce companies in an attempt to elicit sensitive information from recipients, may have met its match. Microsoft, eBay and Visa are joining forces to identify and track phishing attempts. The companies will capture data on phishers and submit it to a network that subscribers can draw alerts from.
Microsoft Corp., eBay Inc. and Visa USA said Monday they will begin working with a private company in Texas to identify and track "phishing" attacks, online scams that lure people into giving up personal and financial information at counterfeit bank and retail Web sites.
The three companies, along with eBay's online payment subsidiary PayPal, said they will capture data on phishing e-mails and Web sites and submit it to a network operated by Austin, Tex.-based WholeSecurity.
Any organization currently targeted by phishing schemes can register to feed fraud data into the system, but only paying customers will be allowed to draw alerts from it.
The e-commerce heavyweights that have agreed to provide data to Whole Security are among the top targets of phishing schemes, which increased more than 8,000 percent in the past year, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a coalition of banks and technology companies.
J.T. Keating, Whole Security's vice president of marketing, said the company plans to market a phishing alert service to Internet service providers and security companies, particularly those that produce anti-phishing "toolbars" -- software that works with a Web browser to prevent users from visiting known phishing sites.
Microsoft spokeswoman Sam McManus said the company hopes to use the information to weed out phishing attacks targeting users of its Hotmail and MSN e-mail services.
Microsoft may eventually integrate the technology into its Internet Explorer Web browser if enough companies sign up to provide fraud data to the network, McManus said.
But some information security experts said the service represents little more than a bid to cash in on the types of informal information sharing relationships that already exist between ISPs, banks and e-commerce companies.
Ken Mirell, a systems manager at Reliable Hosting, a Web hosting and e-mail provider based in San Francisco, said he suspects Microsoft and eBay likely would benefit more from the service than his company.
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