Iconix – PayPal’s new pal?

"Hello, its Michael Barrett again, PayPal's CISO. I'm here to share more ways that you can protect yourself from phishing and identity theft" - was a new entry on the PayPalBlog on January 20, 2008. There it was announced that PayPal launched Iconix eMail ID, a free downloadable tool that will help PayPal users to identify legitimate PayPal emails. The software was beta tested for almost a year by a test group whose feedback was tremendously positive.

Iconix eMail ID is an anti-phishing solution that will place an identifying logo next to the sender's name when a PayPal email for payment is received. This visual tool will help to immediately identify the legitimate users from the phishers who would try to bait unsuspecting users to punch in their personal identifiers on a bogus site.

Iconix stated that its eMail ID program works with such Webmail programs like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, Earthlink and some others. At the same time, Barrett mentioned that PayPal is currently working with the leading Internet service providers (ISPs) to prevent fraudulent emails from getting into users' inboxes. So both parties are trying hard to protect their users from being taken advantage of. "I know that not everyone likes to download software onto their PCs. But if you are ok doing this, I recommend that you download the Iconix plug-in and try it out - it really will help protect you against phishing emails," Barrett wrote.

Marianna, reporter of Ecommerce Journal