PhishNet

Inspiration

Cyberattacks cost over $20 billion per year, affecting organizations and individuals. As we were researching the problem further, we came across a statistic that 90% of all data breaches are the direct result of phishing. After further researching phishing attacks, the idea for PhishNet was born.

What it does

PhishNet provides a centralized way to find verified contact information for the organizations you interact with every day. PhishNet makes it easy to check whether you’re being contacted by real companies or whether you’re being targeted by a phishing attack. If you receive an email or text message from an unknown source, you can immediately check its validity using PhishNet’s search feature. Simply copy the sender’s email address or phone number and PhishNet will tell you whether or not you’re interacting with who you think you are.

How we built it

We started by collecting verified contact information for a number of large, commonly impersonated companies and consolidating it into a data directory. We then used Python as our backend technology to process and search over our data. We further used a Python library called Flask to host our website locally. Finally, we used HTML and CSS to create the frontend UI/UX of PhishNet.

Challenges we ran into

We had time constraints due to learning about the competition relatively late, which caused us to work really hard and focus on completing this project. Also, we initially struggled to balance simplicity with user experience but eventually we landed on our final format.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create a website that is beneficial to society and will hopefully prevent the rising problem of phishing scams from occurring.

What's next for PhishNet

We want to continue to add more organizations to the platform in order to prevent a wider range of scams. We would also like to improve upon the accessibility and user-friendliness of our website. With a vast majority of potential users being elderly, these improvements would be beneficial as older people often struggle to keep up with modern technology.