PhishingGuard (Instant E-mail checker)

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  PhishingGuard

Inspiration

Every day people receive suspicious emails — fake invoices, urgent password resets, or "you won a prize" messages. I wanted a simple, offline tool that helps anyone quickly check if an email might be a phishing attempt, without uploading private data to random websites.

What it does

PhishingGuard lets users paste the text of any email and instantly get a phishing-risk score.
It highlights red flags such as:

• Spoofed sender names or strange domains
  
• Urgent or threatening language
  
• Suspicious links or requests for credentials
  
• Mentions of attachments or payments
  

The tool explains why each indicator was flagged and gives safe-email tips.

How I built it

• Java for text-analysis and regex-based phishing-pattern detection
  
• HTML + JavaScript for the user interface to paste and display results
  
• Basic keyword and URL-pattern matching rules
  
• Runs completely offline — privacy-friendly
  

Challenges

• Avoiding too many false positives
  
• Handling messy copied text from different email clients
  
• Keeping the interface minimal but informative
  

Accomplishments

• Working prototype in a few hundred lines of code
  
• Clear, explainable phishing indicators
  
• Easy to extend with new rules or patterns
  

What I learned

• Regex and string-analysis techniques used in cybersecurity
  
• Designing explainable security tools for ordinary users
  
• How to make a lightweight Java+HTML project usable offline
  

What's next

• Add a browser-extension version
  
• Use a small ML model for smarter risk scoring
  
• Share open-source version on GitHub

Built With

• css
• html
• java
• javascript
• regex