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Phishing campaigns are one of the major security concerns today and are a popular technique used by hackers and cybercriminals to gain entry into a victim’s computer. Many cybercriminals use phishing emails to spread malware like viruses, Trojans, worms and even Ransomware which have become a dangerous form of cyber threat in recent days.
As a technology leader, Google has always tried their best to keep their products safe from such cyber threats. With its Google Docs users recently affected by sophisticated phishing attacks, Google is taking additional precautions to safeguard its Gmail users from phishing emails and spam with 99% accuracy using their advanced machine learning models. They announced the official update to Gmail targeted for Enterprise users which include 3 security features namely unintended external reply warning, click-time warning for malicious links and machine learning to detect phishing emails in advance. The first feature is launched newly while the other two have been made available to business users but they are already existing features already to regular Gmail users.
In order to further optimise its phishing detection, Google has revamped their system to delay some Gmail messages so as to perform comprehensive phishing analysis in the background. Since phishing emails can be detected easily while looking at a group of unsolicited messages, the new Gmail system with integrated machine learning will delay suspicious messages while the algorithms are updated in real-time to perform detailed analysis of these messages. This is applicable to around 0.05% of the messages coming to your Gmail account. Based on Google’s analysis of their past data, more than 50-70% of the emails received by Gmail users are accounted as Spam.
The machine learning detection models used to fight spam and phishing emails also integrate with the Google Safe Browsing service for detecting links to malicious URLs. You can use this service to find the list of URLs which contain malware, spyware or any other malicious content. Based on similarity and reputation analysis of URLs, there will be click-time warnings generated for malicious and phishing URLs which can prevent users from clicking such links unknowingly.
Another important security feature added to Gmail is that it can issue warnings to users against unintended external reply. If you try to reply any emails coming from someone outside of your company domain, Gmail will issue a warning about possible data loss since the mail is sent to an external entity. Gmail is also adding new security features to safeguard users against polymorphic malware and ransomware and with all these new updates it can block millions of additional emails that can harm users.
