PhishGuard

Inspiration

Phishing attacks are one of the most common ways people get hacked, especially through email. I was inspired by how easy it is to fall for a fake message that looks real for both students and everyday users. I wanted to create something simple that could actively protect people in real time without requiring a lot of work.

What it does

PhishGuard is a Chrome extension that detects phishing emails and warns users before they interact with them. It scans email content for suspicious links, usual sender behavior, and common phishing patterns. It tells you if your email is email is likely safe, suspicious, or high risk and provides a risk score as well with details on what is risky.

How I built it

Every time you open an email, it reads the sender, subject, and body, then sends that information to an AI. The AI analyzes it and gives it a risk score, and the extension shows a colored badge right inside Gmail: green means safe, yellow means suspicious, and red means it's likely a phishing attempt. You can click the badge to see exactly why it was flagged. There's also a small popup where you enter your API key so the extension knows how to connect to the AI.

Challenges I ran into

I had to learn everything i used for the project except html

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that i committed to not giving up when it got really really difficult

What I learned

I learned how to build Chrome extensions using TypeScript and how to structure and pass data using JSON. I also got experience working with external AI APIs like OpenRouter and handling asynchronous responses. On top of that, I learned more about how phishing attacks are structured and how to detect them programmatically.