E-mail authentication reduces phishing scams: Google

Washington – The development of e-mail authentication standards has finally reduced e-mail phishing scams, according to Google security researchers.

Elie Bursztein, Google’s anti-abuse research lead, and Vijay Eranti, Gmail’s anti-abuse technical lead, said that these authentication standards, called DomainKey Identified Email (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF), are now in widespread use, Cnet reports.

Internet industry and standards groups have been working since 2004 to get e-mail providers to use authentication to put a halt to e-mail address imitation.

According to the report, more than 3.5 million domains that are active on a weekly basis use the SPF standard, when sending e-mail via SMTP servers, and nearly half-a-million e-mail sending and receiving domains that are active weekly adopted the DKIM standards.