Yahoo! is leading the fight against fraudulent emails and online phishing scams, by teaming up with industry leaders to develop DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to give users extra protection.In a combined effort to combat email forgery, phishing and online fraud, Yahoo!, Cisco, Sendmail and PGP Corporation revealed that the internet technical standards group, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), has approved DKIM.
Email authentication network DKIM uses cryptographic signature technology to identify the domain of an email sender.
It will provide businesses with heightened brand protection, as it can determine the legitimacy of a message and its origins.
The groups involved in DKIM will now be working closely with internet service providers, businesses, financial institutions and the open source community to adopt and incorporate it into future products and offerings.
Mark Delany, lead architect for Yahoo! Mail and author of DomainKeys, said: "As the largest Web mail provider in the world, we view protecting email users from scams as a top priority.
"We are gratified that the core DomainKeys technology, which Yahoo! first introduced in 2003, has evolved to reach this milestone through the IETF process, and that DomainKeys Identified Mail is positioned to become the pre-eminent standard for email authentication."
Figures released by the Anti-Phishing Working Group revealed that almost 24,000 scams were reported in the US in February this year.
"DKIM can improve users' trust in email and, in doing so, make the internet a safer and more useful tool," said DKIM author Jim Fenton from Cisco.
