PayPal to Help Combat Fraud with Two-Factor System
PayPal have recently announced an optional two-factor security key to help combat online fraud. More confident customers is surely great news for us shopping cart owners.A lot of phishing e-mails now target PayPal and eBay users, largely because they are such a huge demographic (over 123 million customers at the end of last year), but also because PayPal is designed to make it easy to move money around.Surprisingly, however, phishing is not a large financial problem for PayPal or its customers, but customers receiving phishing emails lose confidence, so PayPal’s two-factor efforts should help with some of these worries.In order to combat phishing attacks that could include questions about the new six digit code, PayPal have integrated a feature that means users have only a short time to access the account before the code changes.
As well as introducing two-factor, PayPal is responding to this drop in public confidence by introducing a new green light system where users of Internet Explorer 7 will see the browser flash green if the site is safe.
‘One of the other things we are doing is heavily pushing digital signature and email signing technologies so that all PayPal and eBay outbound email is digitally signed,’ said Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal.