Major Email Providers Set Phish Trap

Agaris Email Trust Fabric finds fans at AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The goal: Stop spoofing of legitimate email domains.

What do AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have in common, apart from the letter o? Among several possible answers, spam is certainly one. The billion email inboxes managed by the four companies get far too much spam, including plenty of phishing attacks.
In an effort to find a solution to their common problem, the four companies have been working with a startup called
Agari
to implement the Agari Email Trust Fabric, a email authentication layer that limits the effectiveness of phishing.
Agaris system cant stop phishing entirely because its a social engineering attack: Phishing works by duping the recipient of a phishing message into clicking on a malicious link that appears to be legitimate. But the company claims it can eliminate a particularly effective attack vector: The misuse of trusted email domains.
The Agari Email Trust Fabric prevents malicious email senders from spoofing legitimate email domains within its set of protected mailboxes. It does this through a cloud service built using
SPF
and
DKIM
, two established domain authentication technologies.
[ 2011 was a big year for Google. Find out more in
Googles Daring Dozen: 12 Big Bets In 2011
. ]
Citing an RSA study, Patrick Peterson, CEO of Agari, said in a phone interview that phishing costs companies $1 billion annually.
Financial services companies, in particular, suffer from phishing, both in terms of fraud losses and diminished customer trust. But perhaps not much longer: With Agaris technology, Peterson said that some large clients are seeing 50 million phishing messages blocked per day.
That is a massive win for them, he said, noting that Agaris system can stop 100% of phishing messages that rely on spoofing the domains of its customers. Thats not every phishing attempt--deceptively misspelled domains that look like legitimate domains, for example, may not be caught--but its a start.
Peterson says Agari can help companies understand how their online identity is being used and can help them enforce policy controls.
Google product manager Adam Dawes, in a statement, observed that Google has been working with various email authentication standards since 2004. While coordinated authentication between sender and receiver has historically proved to be a challenge, he suggests that Agaris approach can help.
Agaris approach simplifies the authentication process for large email senders, helps them communicate clear policies to receivers like Gmail, and creates higher communications value for their email transactions, he said.
Agaris system also gathers massive amounts of data for its customers. With the help of analytical tools, customers can see whats going on in their email channel and they can share their findings with authorities or ISPs to help shut down email abuse.
Peterson, however, insists that Agari doesnt see its customers data, and wont become a magnet for authorities seeking access to email users data. We think [our system] draws the line quite nicely between privacy concerns and actually providing some actionable threat intelligence, he said.
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Major Email Providers Set Phish Trap