Stopping phishermen
in their tracks

Many of the phishers that deluge inboxes use PayPal and eBay as a hook to obtain user information.

Now the popular online auction house and payment service are fighting back — with the assistance of Yahoo's anti-phishing technology.

The technology supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which requires senders to confirm their identity through a digital signature, according to BBC News. Spammers typically use fake email addresses so nothing can be traced back to them.

Email analyst MessageLabs says 1 in every 173 emails sent contains some sort of phishing attack, and a recent YouGov poll found 35 percent of 2,700 UK users polled receive more than 10 spam emails each day.

Yahoo believes DKIM will be a welcome asset for its email service clients. But in order for DKIM to work, both sender and receiver must be using the technology.

Developed by Yahoo, the technology is backed by Google, IBM, AOL, SendMail and Verisign. A second standard, called Sender Policy Framework, is backed by Microsoft, Amazon and eBay, which supports both.