PhishGuard AI: Forensic Phishing Protection

Inspiration

With the rise of sophisticated phishing attacks, standard email filters are no longer enough. We wanted to build a tool that doesn't just block emails, but provides forensic insights and visual cues to help users understand why an email is suspicious, empowering them with security knowledge.

What it does

PhishGuard AI is a two-part security solution. First, a Chrome extension for Gmail that uses AI to analyze email content in real-time and highlights suspicious phrases directly in the browser. Second, a premium SOC Dashboard that provides security teams with a birds-eye view of all detected threats, risk scores, and forensic breakdowns.

How we built it

We built the core engine using the Chrome Extension API (MV3) to scrape and analyze email content. We integrated the Google Gemini API for deep forensic analysis. The dashboard was built with Next.js for a fast, responsive UI, and the backend was developed with Node.js/Express to handle data persistence and authentication.

Challenges we ran into

Handling real-time DOM manipulation in a fast-paced environment like Gmail without degrading performance was a major technical hurdle. We also faced challenges in ensuring stable communication between the background scripts and the dashboard while maintaining a "normal" authentication flow for ease of use.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the seamless integration between the extension and the dashboard. Achieving real-time highlighting of suspicious phrases while providing a professional, dark-themed forensic report was a major win for our team.

What we learned

We learned the importance of modular architecture when building browser extensions and how to effectively leverage LLMs like Gemini for specialized security tasks like forensic analysis and risk scoring.

What's next for PhishGuard AI: Forensic Phishing Protection

We plan to expand PhishGuard to other platforms like Outlook, add automated incident response capabilities, and implement more advanced behavioral analysis to stay ahead of evolving phishing tactics.