The phishing domain check is an automated tool that checks a potential phishing URL against known lists of bad domains and other information. Often, these tools will also look for warning signs such as the date of the domain registration and whether or not it has an SSL certificate. They also look for DMARC verification and SPF/DKIM to see if an email has been verified as legitimate by a company’s email security service.

These tools can save employees time because the average person is overwhelmed with the amount of emails they receive each day. The phishing domain check helps them to filter out the majority of these so they can focus on the more important emails that require their attention.

Domain Reputation Assessment: Evaluating Your Online Trustworthiness

ML models use data from real websites to identify discrepancies in the domain information and SSL certificates. This can help them spot phishing attempts that would otherwise be undetected by humans. They can also scan the website’s content for telltale signs of phishing, such as template texts and non-Latin letters (e.g. “rn” looks like “m”), homoglyph attacks (where a lowercase L or an I is used to look like a W) and domain spoofing (where attackers impersonate a brand or other person).

These models can also examine an email’s header for phishing indicators. These include spoofed sender names, irregularities in the ‘from’ or ‘reply-to’ fields and a host name that is not listed in a company’s email domain list.