Gmail Increases Email Security With Phishing Protection

Phishing is still one of the biggest security threats that users face on the Internet. It basically means that criminals are sending emails to users that make them believe they are coming from an email sender that they can trust. Most phishing emails pose as emails from financial organizations like PayPal or banks and ask the user to enter user data which will then be “phished” and used to remove money from the user’s account. There are other forms of phishing including the very popular account phishing where attackers try to take over accounts on sites like eBay or games like World of Warcraft.

A new widget has been recently added to Gmail labs that increases email security by offering phishing protection for the two services PayPal and eBay. Emails send by these two services are authenticated by the widget and an authentication icon is displayed in the Gmail interface so that the user can see at first glance that the emails are coming from the original source.

The main advantage of this added layer of phishing protection is that emails that claim to be from either PayPal or eBay but are not will now be deleted before they reach the user’s email account meaning that they will not appear in the spam folder either. Google is hoping to add additional services in the future to increase the reach of the additional email security layer.

Users can add the new phishing protection by logging into their Gmail account, clicking on the Settings link in the top right corner, switching to the Labs tab and enabling the Authentication icon for verified senders widget.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday July 14, 2009 -
Tags:ebay, Email, email security, gmail, gmail security, paypal, phishing protection

Responses so far:

1. Sarang Dravid says:

   July 14, 2009 at 2:53 pm

   its a good step frm gmail towards security, but it will not take un der effect unless users thmselves gt a bit knwledge abt phishing and all threats.. day by day many rapidshare users gt hacked cauze if the same and Rapidshare is working hard to protect his users from scams.. still cause of illiteracy towards scamming users are getting hacked …!!

   Reply
2. Data Cabling Company says:

   July 14, 2009 at 7:01 pm

   I could not tell you how many emails I get from Ebay telling me that I have items I have bidded on and have won and I need to make payment or I receive emails telling me that I need to leave comments about Items that I have bought although I have not been on Ebay for MONTHS!

   Reply
3. davester says:

   July 15, 2009 at 4:25 am

   hmmm why is this site acting like Gmail is still in beta?
   someone else wrote about this a week ago ..

   http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/google-finally-peels-the-beta-label-off-gmail-docs-calendar-and-gtalk/

   Reply