Anti-Phishing protection
Phishing is an attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, bank account or credit card details via email or web pages disguised as a trustworthy entity. This activity is usually done for malicious reasons. It is a form of social engineering (manipulation of users to obtain confidential information).
ESET Mail Security includes anti-phishing protection which prevents users from accessing web pages known for phishing. In the case of email messages that may contain links that lead to phishing web pages, ESET Mail Security uses a sophisticated parser that searches the incoming email message's subject and body to identify dangerous links (URLs).
The links are compared against a phishing database. If the email is considered a phishing message as a result of the evaluation, ESET Mail Security manages it according to the Action to take on phishing message setting for each protection layer (Mail transport protection, Database protection and On-demand database scan). Rule actions are also executed.
Supported email format standards:
•Plain text
•HTML-only
•MIME
•Multipart MIME (an email that includes both HTML and plain text)
Supported HTML entities:
Phishing messages might contain HTML entities to obfuscate the anti-phishing engine. The anti-phishing protection also parses and translates HTML symbols to find and correctly evaluate obfuscated URLs.
A single character can be represented in different forms. For example, a period can be represented in the following forms:
How links usually appear in the email message to the user |
Value |
Obfuscated links contained in the message body |
Type |
|---|---|---|---|
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
. |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
character |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
. |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
entity name |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
. |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
entity hexadecimal number |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
. |
http://www.example-phishing-domain.com/Fraud |
entity decimal number |
To see the anti-phishing mail protection activity, check the Log files > Mail server protection log. The log has information about email messages and their phishing links.
Report a phishing site
You can click Report to notify ESET of a phishing or malicious website.