AI is already beginning to be used in spear phishing attacks. A malicious attacker can now send unique personalized emails, with contextual relevance, and using psychological manipulation (i.e., fear, greed, curiosity, etc.). These emails can easily be produced at scale for very little money. The ability to use contextual relevance - that is, information from any public source from press releases to information on social media networks can be quickly gathered and included in an AI generated spear phishing email that will have perfect grammar and perfect spelling. No amount of training is going to protect you or your users from eventually being fooled.

How will you deal with this new automated onslaught?

One answer is to use the Phishing Net AI for Microsoft 365 which uses AI to help you outsmart these attacks.

This Outlook add-in analyzes emails with AI to quickly examine any URL links found in an email and provide an overall, easy to read PhishScore™ for each of those URLs. You can easily see the PhishScore™ any email gets in the Task Pane, along with the ability to easily submit that suspicious email to your Corporate Security Officer (CSO) and/or other reporting agencies like DHS, FTC, or Microsoft itself.

Our PhishScore™ is powered by our own internal techniques and by an industry leading AI tool that can quickly and effectively analyze emails to detect malicious phishing links in emails. In particular, it gets right to the heart of the problem - the URLs that users might inadvertently click on. It looks at URLs to determine their validity, first checking against a database of known bad URLs and then examines various parts of the URL to return an overall score on how dangerous a particular email might be.

In addition, with this add-in in place once the user has identified a suspicious looking email, all they have to do is click the Submit button. The add-in then starts a new email pre-addressed to your IT staff or corporate security officer, grabs the suspicious email and attaches it, then sends that email (we call that the notification email) so that others can benefit from your experience. After that notification email has gone out successfully, it deletes both that email (out of the Sent Items) and the original suspicious email. Nothing could be simpler and safer for your users.

And to make it easy for administrators, when you sign up for Phishing Net for Microsoft 365, in addition to the Outlook add-in, you get access to a dashboard that allows you centralized control over the add-in and all its settings for yourself or for your entire company. You can see the dashboard here.

Based just south of Jacksonville, Florida, Sperry Software has been producing professional Outlook email tools for over 20 years.

Phishing Net AI (for Microsoft 365)

by Sperry Software, Inc.