Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Gmail protects from phishing

Jason [PersonRank 0]

Friday, October 1, 2004
19 years ago

I just checked my spam filter and noticed one that appeared to be from Paypal. I opened it and a nice colored box was in the mail from Gmail warning me about clicking links that try to get your info. Gmail also disabled the links (they were links that had real urls as the text of the link).

There was also a link to Gmail Help Center (https://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8253):

Google is currently testing a service designed to alert Gmail users to messages that appear to be phishing attacks. When the Gmail team becomes aware of such an attack, the details of these messages are used to automatically identify future suspected phishing attacks.

The result: when a Gmail user opens a suspected phishing message, Gmail displays a warning.

Gmail's phishing alerts operate automatically, much like spam filtering. Gmail's spam filters automatically divert messages that are suspected of being unwanted messages into 'Spam'. Similarly, Gmail's phishing alerts automatically display warnings with messages that are suspected of being phishing attacks so that users know to take care before providing any personal information.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Nice. Why didn't anyone think of this before? Or do Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and others do this as well?

Jason [PersonRank 0]

19 years ago #

I don't think they do. I've never had an email tell me it was a phishing attack and to be careful. lol. They always say "don't give out your info" and generic things like that on all mails, and only AOL I have seen do that.

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!