Get an Insight on Various Types of Anti-Phishing Services

Cybercriminals invade into your enterprise’s information systems and figure out new ways and new vulnerabilities to execute more sophisticated phishing attacks. Human, time and again have proved to be the weakest link in the security chain before organizations take some preventive measures to stop phishing.

‘Anti Phishing Services’ are used to prevent phishing attacks against the individuals, systems or organizations.

Type of Anti- Phishing Services Available Today

With the increasing cybercrime by every passing day, there are several anti-phishing services which help to prevent or defend against any phishing attack.

Browser-Based Anti-phishing Services

This is a domain binding segment of the anti-phishing services. Anti-phishing solutions attempt to identify phishing related content, symptoms or suspicious domain names contained in an email, websites etc. and block the content based on configured rules, and generally will issue an alert to the users.

Example: Spoofguard examines phishing symptoms and increases alert based on them. While systems like Pwdhash generates domain based passwords specific to websites. There are plenty of anti-phishing security solutions available for getting a comprehensive anti-phishing service provided by Phish Protection.

Content Filtering Anti phishing Services 

The technique is used to filter the malicious content which enters the user’s mailbox. 

Example: Bayesian content filtering is a common anti-phishing technique which analyses the header content of your incoming mail to assess if the email is legitimate or not. They work on spams and legitimate emails together to create a database of keywords which is inclusive of phrases, HTML codes, colour patterns and body content of the mail. Some vendors offering this service are Kaspersky Internet Security, Death2Spam, and Bright Mail, etc.

There are also some companies that provide reliable website reputation services which have embedded threat intelligence in their systems to keep users safe from fraudulent websites and also help them stop malicious network traffic, and enforce policy compliance by blocking unapproved or malicious content.

Blacklist-Based Anti phishing Services  

Blacklists consist of several malicious URLs. The blacklists use manual voting, crawlers, and honey pots to collect the data. Vendors offering this service are Microsoft, Opera, and AOL.

Example: Netcraft creates a list of phishing sites reported by the toolbar community. The system then cross-checks the blacklist to analyze every URL entered. In case of a match, the system warns us with a malicious website sign.

Types of Anti-Phishing Software

“The most common pattern we see in support is customers who come to us after a phishing incident bypassed their existing email filter. They assumed their provider was handling it. The reality is that most built-in email filters were designed for spam, not for targeted phishing attacks. The threat landscape has moved past what basic filters can handle.” — Vasile Diaconu, Operations Lead, DuoCircle

The anti-phishing software consists of code which identifies phishing content and blocks the material with a warning to the user. For instance, Modus Cloud, an IP filtering engine inspects emails which mimic high level corporate and detects similar looking domains. They also provide exclusive plug-ins to look through quarantined files for anti-phishing security. 

In today’s digital world, everybody uses different types of computer systems and OS for their requirements. With this advent, we are suggesting an anti-phishing solution for various systems and also use phishing simulator to train your employees.

Anti-phishing for Office 365

With the help of machine learning and impersonation detection algorithms, Office 365 offers an inbuilt anti-phishing system. It is part of the office threat protection program.

Anti- Phishing for Mac

Although Windows 10 is a highly vulnerable system, MacOS is also susceptible to threats in 2019. There are multiple anti-malware options like Bitdefender, Avast, Sophos, and Avira for Mac-based threats.

Anti-phishing Toolbar

Considered second layer protection to prevent your system from phishing attacks. Combing you toolbar protection with your antivirus is a considerable security measure against any phishing attacks.

** **Despite having all the anti-phishing solutions available, the question which now arises is, how can we still protect ourselves from phishing threats? A few tips to enhance your Anti-phishing protection skill:

• Watch out for shorter links on social media, e-mails and websites. Cybercriminals use sources from Bitly to fraud users into clicking a fake link.
• Received a suspicious looking e-mail in your inbox? If you read carefully, you will find typos, random words in capitals or more exclamatory greetings.
• Threat and urgent deadlines should never be given importance. Never fall prey to tactics such as – stop your account from getting closed, transfer an amount to avoid being a ax defaulter or other such tactics.

There are anti phishing services pros and cons that you need to keep in mind while planning to decide on which anti phishing services to buy. There are no strict guidelines to follow when it comes to securing yourself from phishing threats. But keeping in mind the essential phishing protection best practices will surely benefit.