Abstract

This study is aimed at developing an open intelligence source which has spam detection and filtering functionality against phishing activities via email.

The proposed system was designed with the aim of catering for the limitations observed in existing spam detection software. In line with the general objective of the study, the alternative system to be designed and developed was named ‘Can-I-Trust-It’.

The artefact was designed using PHP, as well as, html, CSS, jQuery tools and MySQL tool. The spam filter is designed to identify emails which hackers use to send unwanted or dangerous content to potential victims of phishing attacks. It is built to use different filtering methods to identify the content of emails of their senders and then flag the email as spam. It also examines an email for explicit content that could contain malicious links. It is built with different spam filtering algorithms using blacklists of keywords, headers, languages, domains etc. which enables a scalable knowledge base system that can be fully customized according to user preferences. The system is also suitable for analysing offline bulk email correspondence checks and forensic investigations within an organisation.

Can I trust it? Open-source intelligence in defence against phishing