Antiphishing

Antiphishing is a set of measures to reduce the risk of phishing, a form of social engineering in which attackers impersonate trusted entities to steal credentials, financial information, or to deliver malware. Antiphishing covers prevention, detection, and response across users, organizations, and networks.

Prevention focuses on reducing opportunities for phishing to succeed. This includes user education and awareness programs, frequent simulated phishing campaigns, and clear reporting paths for suspicious messages. Technical prevention involves sender verification through email authentication standards such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC; the use of HTTPS with valid TLS certificates; certificate validation and security indicators in browsers; and protections like HSTS. Organizations often deploy domain-based filtering, URL reputation services, and link rewriting in gateways to block or warn about risky destinations before users click.

Detection relies on automated analysis to identify phishing attempts in email, web pages, or apps. Machine learning and heuristic methods examine link structure, content similarity, sender reputation, and attachment characteristics. Enterprise and browser security tools may analyze real-time webpage content and metadata, block known malicious domains, and warn users about unsafe sites. Endpoint protection and security gateways can also flag or quarantine suspected phishing artifacts.

Response and containment involve incident handling, containment of affected accounts or devices, credential resets, domain and IP blocklists, forensic analysis, and coordinated reporting to appropriate authorities or vendors. Ongoing evaluation uses metrics such as phishing awareness, click rates in training, false-positive rates, detection time, and incident frequency to improve defenses. Challenges include evolving attacker tactics, encrypted traffic, and supply-chain phishing.