Real-time Database for Spear Phishing Detection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Spear phishing attacks are highly targeted and difficult to address due to their personalized nature, often resulting in successful scams that involve tricking individuals or organizations into divulging sensitive information or installing malware, with a long duration between initial communication and fraud events.
Innovation Solution
A system and method utilizing a real-time database implementation, such as SnapCache, to receive and analyze blocked emails or communications, extract financial directives like account and routing numbers, publish them as topics on a shared data bus, enhance with payloads, and alert users of potential attacks by matching extracted data against stored information, performing analytics to refine detection and prevent fraud.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional phishing detection methods are used, then basic spam filtering is achieved, but spear phishing attacks with personalized content remain difficult to detect and address
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the detection process into multiple specialized modules: blocked information reception, real-time database storage, data streaming processing, financial direction identification, account number extraction, pattern matching, and alert generation. Each module handles a specific aspect of spear phishing detection, allowing the complex detection task to be broken down into manageable components that work together to achieve high accuracy without overwhelming complexity in any single area.
2Speed
If real-time database implementation is used, then immediate processing and alerting of phishing attempts is achieved, but system infrastructure complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The real-time database serves multiple functions simultaneously: it stores blocked information from multiple sources, processes streaming data in real-time, maintains extracted account numbers and routing numbers, enables pattern matching against historical data, and supports alert generation. By making the database multi-functional, the system achieves fast processing speeds without proportionally increasing infrastructure complexity, as a single database system handles all these operations rather than requiring separate systems for each function.
3Quantity of substance
If multiple data streaming sources are integrated, then comprehensive monitoring of blocked communications is achieved, but data processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges data from multiple streaming sources (email filters, data loss prevention systems, spam filters, and other blocked communication sources) into a unified real-time database. By combining these data streams at the database level rather than processing them separately through multiple complex pipelines, the system achieves comprehensive monitoring of large volumes of data while reducing overall processing complexity through consolidation and centralization.
Data Source
AI summary
The invention relates generally to a system and method that addresses spear phishing attempts. Embodiment of the present invention identifies messages that would have been blocked through a data loss prevention system and/or spam filters and further extracts financial directives (e.g., wire transfer information, account numbers, routing numbers, etc.). The extracted data may be stored and managed in a real-time database and used as a check for other transactions within the group, company and beyond.