Anti-phishing technologies have no effect on spam
A security company has warned that technology touted to combat phishing attack and emails with spoofed addresses will have little effect on the war against spam. Technologies such as Sender ID and Sender Policy Framework are indeed an effective way of weeding out email that appears to be from one address but is in fact sent from elsewhere, says CipherTrust, but they have no mechanism to identify what messages are and are not spam. Indeed the company's latest finding reveal that spammers have taken to authentication technologies with gusto - registering their details to meet Sender Policy Framework requirements - and to such an extent that 34 per cent more spam email is getting past these authentication checks than legitimate email. CipherTrust analysed messages sent through its IronMail Sender Policy Framework-based products and found that spam was three times more likely to get through than legitimate email. Paul Judge, chief technology officer at CipherTrust, said: 'These protocols alone are not effective in identifying spam because spammers are doing what they always have - adapting in order to circumvent measures aimed at stopping spam. The good news is the largest organizations in the world are recognizing the importance of email authentication because it is very effective at stopping spoofing and phishing attacks. The rollout of the latest protocol, Sender ID, is led by strong industry collaboration, and will result in widespread deployment and success in the fight against spoofing and phishing.' Sender ID is the latest email authentication technology which uses both the Sender Policy Framework and Microsoft's Caller ID technology, and a third specification called the Submitter Optimization. CipherTrust says it will support Sender ID in version 4.5 of the IronMail appliance, due out in October.
Reproduced from an article published by PC Pro
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