According to Google software engineer Ela Iwaszkiewicz, Google will now provide three enhancements to Gmail messages that provide users with a more robust defense against phishing.
“Starting today, Gmail will automatically display more information about the origin of certain messages you receive so you can be better informed and protect yourself from getting tricked”, Iwaszkiewicz wrote in a post on Google’s official Gmail blog.
The first new feature includes displaying the full email address of any sender that does not appear in the recipient’s Gmail contacts list. Also included will be full email address information when messages are sent on behalf of another party – and example Google provides is when people share news stories from websites via a “share this story” link. In these cases, the complete email address of the sender will be displayed along with the website URL it was forwarded from.
Finally, Google said it will evaluate a message’s “authentication data” to determine if the message comes from a “spoofed” Gmail address. If the web email service believes this is the case, it will display a prominent warning at the top of the message stating that the correspondence may not have been sent by the person or organization noted as the sender.
Google has good reason to continue beefing up Gmail security regarding phishing attempts, Infosecurity notes. Earlier this month the company disclosed a targeted phishing attack against Gmail users, among them several senior US officials, Chinese political activists, and journalists.
Comments
tnguyengp says:
01 July 2011
Even services like Gmail that support encryption between your computer and their service can’t guarantee your message will be transmitted securely between their mail server and your recipient’s mail server. This is because if the recipient’s mail server doesn’t support encryption (which it often doesn’t) Gmail is forced to fallback to transmitting your message in plain text. I use this free service to send and receive encrypted emails at https://www.sendinc.com/ It allows anyone to send and receive military-grade secure encrypted emails in minutes and requires no special technical expertise. There is no required software to purchase, download, or install. Anyone can use this to transmit and receive secure messages for free using strong email encryption.
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