Apple Has Plans To Do Away With Spoofing And Phishing Attacks

For those who might be a bit careless or not particularly tech savvy, you could leave yourself open to phishing attacks. More often than not, there are emails being sent to unsuspecting users asking them to reset their bank password, but these emails contain links that takes the user to a website that looks like it belongs to their bank, but in reality it is a phishing scheme.

Well Apple wants to do away with that and according to a recently discovered patent, the Cupertino company has explored the idea of removing such links from websites, or at the very least prevent them from being displayed on browsers, like Safari which is found on Apple’s OS X and iOS platform.

How this works is the system will attempt to detect if the link in a particular website or email is considered to be safe. This will be done by analyzing the URL in the link to see if it actually links to the intended website. Sometimes how these attacks work is that they create a URL that looks similar to the actual URL but it might be misspelt so that those who aren’t too observant will fall for it.

Should the system detect that the link in question is a bad one, or at least a questionable one, it will then disable it so that users won’t be able to click on it. It sounds like a good idea but given that it was filed back in 2013, safe to say that Apple has yet to implement it, and considering that not all patents are made into actual products/features, it is unclear if this one will.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Web
Tags: Malware, Patent, Security