Anti-Phishing

Anti Phishing

Phishing or Pharming is a technique used by e-mail spammers to capture secure information such as usernames, passwords, and bank account numbers from the users unwittingly. Spammers send e-mails pretend to arrive from PayPal, amazon.com, ebay, and major banks with a link to a fake site designed to imitate real sites. The E-mail generally has a clever subject line designed to alarm or entice users into performing an action outlined in the e-mail. For example, phishing emails use lines such as: "PayPal® Account Review Department" or "NatWest Bank: Confirmation Required!" Unsuspecting users click on the link imbedded in the e-mail and are transferred to the fake website and enter login information which is then captured by the spammer and used to possibly conduct criminal activity.

How ITA Secure Messaging Processes Phishing Spam

ITA Secure Messaging detects and blocks these types of e-mails using sophisticated techniques. Each arriving e-mail is processed and analyzed in the following ways:
1. Sender e-mail address domain is verified to make sure the MX IP address matches with the domain name. It is then verified that the e-mail is coming from the domain name it claims to be.

2. Imbedded links are verified to make sure they are sent to the real domain such as ebay.com, paypal.com and not to the fake websites setup by the spammer. A common technique used by spammers to fool users is that the link name appears to be valid name such as http://accountverification.ebay.com, but the actual link is set to go to a fake site such as http://192.168.1.10. ITA Secure messaging checks for these types of tricks and blocks these emails as spam.

3. A real time anti phishing database, which is constantly updated by the IT Networks, is used by ITA Secure Messaging servers to determine if the e-mail originating from an IP is a known phishing spam sender.

Anatomy of a Phishing Spam E-mail