Email Phishing Protection via Linkmap Domain Verification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Email phishing attacks pose a significant threat as users often fail to recognize malicious links in seemingly legitimate emails, leading to potential credential theft, with existing methods being unreliable due to the dynamic nature of hacking techniques and the time-consuming process of detecting malicious code.
Innovation Solution
A computer system and method that analyze received emails to identify company names and extract domain names from links, querying a linkmap for trusted domain names, generating warnings for mismatches, and updating the linkmap based on user interactions to verify email authenticity, employing computer vision and language processing techniques.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If existing methods detect malicious code in emails, then they can identify phishing threats, but the process is time-consuming and unreliable due to the dynamic nature of hacking techniques
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-establishes a linkmap database containing trusted domain names and company information before phishing attacks occur. When an email is received, the system quickly checks if the domain matches pre-stored trusted domains, eliminating the need for time-consuming real-time malicious code analysis and providing immediate reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a domain name as an intermediary element between the email sender and the recipient. Instead of directly analyzing malicious code in emails, the system mediates trust verification through domain name matching against the pre-established linkmap, simplifying the detection process and improving both speed and reliability.
2Reliability
If users manually examine email links for authenticity, then they can avoid phishing attacks, but this process is time-consuming and most users do not take the time to examine them
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs automatic domain verification without requiring user intervention. The email client autonomously checks if the domain name in received emails matches trusted domains in the linkmap, and automatically generates warnings for mismatches, eliminating the need for users to manually examine links while maintaining high protection effectiveness.
Solution Approach 2:
The system provides immediate feedback to users by automatically generating warnings when domain names do not match trusted domains in the linkmap. This feedback mechanism informs users of potential phishing threats without requiring them to perform verification tasks, making protection both effective and easy to use.
3Reliability
If the system checks every email link against a database of malicious code, then it can detect phishing threats, but this increases device complexity and processing requirements
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the domain name from email links for verification purposes, rather than analyzing the entire email content or malicious code. This extraction approach simplifies the verification process to a straightforward string matching operation against pre-stored trusted domains, significantly reducing system complexity while maintaining detection accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the verification parameter from complex malicious code analysis to simple domain name string matching. By transforming the verification task into comparing domain names against pre-stored trusted domain strings in the linkmap, the system achieves high detection accuracy with minimal processing complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer system is provided. The computer system includes a memory and at least one processor coupled to the memory and configured to provide protection against theft of user credentials by email phishing attacks. The at least one processor is further configured to identify a company name included in a received email; identify a link in the received email; extract a domain name from the identified link; search a linkmap for an existing record associated with the identified company name, wherein the linkmap comprises a collection of records, the records relating names of companies to trusted domain names; determine if the extracted domain name matches a trusted domain name of the existing record; and identify the received email as genuine in response to the determination of the match.