PayPal Makes Drying Up Phishing Holes a Priority

Computerworld - With 133 million users of its online payment service worldwide, PayPal is arguably one of the most recognizable Internet brands — and one of the most frequent targets of phishing attacks as well. Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at theeBay Inc. unit, spoke with Computerworld last week about the phishing problem and PayPal’s multipronged strategy for handling it. Excerpts follow:

Why do you think PayPal is targeted so much by attackers? Actually, there are two reasons. One is we have a very large customer base by the standards of most companies — 133 million customers on a global basis. We also have a business model that makes it easy by design to move money around between those 133 million individuals. By definition, that’s going to make both us and our customers targets.

What’s your biggest security challenge right now? The most significant issue is phishing. Phishing definitely is something we hear [about] loud and clear from our customers. They want us to take that away, and we’re working very actively on addressing that. We don’t believe it’s a problem that there is a single silver bullet for. We also think it’s an industry problem. In fact, quite a lot of what we’re trying to do is link the industry in coming up with a solution.

So, what are you doing to fight the phishers? Basically, what we’re doing is taking a broad-brush strategy. Sometimes people say — and I don’t subscribe to this belief — that spam is an uncontrollable problem. If you mean, can you catch every bit of spam and phish mail, that is probably very difficult to achieve. But can you deal with it such that you see very little spam and very little phish mail? I would submit [that] technically, we already know how to do that. I just think that by and large, we haven’t put the controls in front of the consumers.

What sort of controls do you mean? A couple of years ago, there was a lot of discussion in the industry about digitally signing e-mails on their way out of corporations like ours. And then there was a standards war, and essentially all the momentum got lost. We’ve decided that it’s time again for somebody to take a leadership position. We are, in fact, completely agnostic about what drives standards. As it stands, there are two perfectly functional ones: SPF and DomainKeys. We’re ready 100% to start signing all outbound e-mail from [eBay and PayPal] using both SPF and DomainKeys.

We [also] are working with the major ISPs and giving them permission [to delete] a piece of e-mail that claims to originate from us but is not legitimately signed by us. I think that by the end of this year, we actually will have done that with several ISPs. The other thing we’re doing is finding ways of working with the e-mail client vendors to make it much clearer when e-mail has been legitimately signed or not.