Anti-Phishing protection
Phishing is an attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, bank account or credit card details and PINs 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 (manipulating users to obtain confidential information).
ESET Mail Security includes Anti-Phishing protection which prevents users from accessing web pages known for phishing. In case of email messages that may contain links which lead to phishing web pages, ESET Mail Security uses sophisticated parser that searches message body and subject of incoming email messages to identify such links (URL's). The links are compared against phishing database. If the result of evaluation is positive, email is considered to be a phishing message and ESET Mail Security deals with it according to Action to take on phishing message setting for each protection layer (Mail transport protection, Mailbox database protection and On-demand database scan).
Supported email body format standards:
•Plain text
•HTML
•TNEF
Phishing messages might contain HTML entities to obfuscate anti-phishing engines. The Anti-phishing protection also parses and translates symbols of HTML entities to find and correctly evaluate obfuscated links.
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 activity of Anti-phishing mail protection, check to Log files > Mail server protection log. It will contain information about email messages and the phishing links that were found.
Report a phishing site
Click Report enables you to report a phishing or malicious website to ESET for analysis.