Hoplite Technology Anti-Phishing Bot: Protecting everyday users against phishing attacks

With an inherent emphasis in “privacy-by-default”, Hoplite Technology announced the new launch of a free anti-phishing solution named Anti-Phishing Bot (APBot) to protect everyday users against phishing attacks.

A phishing email is a form of cyberattacks where cybercriminals impersonate a trusted party to gain access to sensitive information. Due to the lack of ways to verify the identity of the senders, everyday users without technical trainings will often find it difficult to distinguish a phishing attack as the red flags are hidden in different parts of an email.

While many anti-phishing solutions are designed for IT Administrators with cybersecurity knowledge, APBot prioritizes usability, and enhances the tool through community crowdsourcing.

With just one click, the user could detect and report a phishing email, at the same time, similar emails will be flagged within the APBot community, and through this ecosystem the detection accuracy of the AI-assisted tool will gradually improve.

To protect users’ privacy, APBot also follows “privacy-by-default” principle to detect email frauds based on the sender’s behavior and network profile without reading the email content. APBot analyzes email delivery path and flags out those emails with suspicious patterns, this process does not need to process the email content.

“In the past year, our team has been investigating email phishing attacks and consulting companies who experienced payment fraud due to fake emails/invoices. In the process, we found out how difficult it was for everyday users to identify phishing emails,” said Antony Ma, Founder at Hoplite Technology and Chairman of Cloud Security Alliance Hong Kong and Macau Chapter.

“With APBot, a user can train a personalized and intelligent AI to help them in identifying fake emails.”

As of January 2021, APBot have been trained with a database containing email sender patterns from over 200 different financial institutions and it’s growing every day with more and more users joining the APBot community.

The ease of use is one of the advantages of using APBot which does not require the users to have any relevant training and can be integrated with popular email tools, such as Gmail, Office 365 and Hotmail, as an add-on without software installation.

“Traditionally, identifying phishing emails requires training and network knowledge, but APBot has simplified the process. We believe senior citizens and students who are more vulnerable to social engineering will benefit from the protections offered by APBot,” said Ma.