A new player in the anti-phishing arena, Inky, has received a Cyber Start-up Company of the Year Award at the inaugural Infosecurity North America conference in Boston.
Inky was one of four start-ups pitching a panel of four venture capitalist judges for the award. The company and its innovative anti-phishing solution won over the judges.
Inky has developed a new phishing defense solution called Phish Fence. Phish Fence is a platform that provides protection against a new form of phishing, which Inky calls ‘deep sea phishing.’
Deep sea phishing is an attack where threat actors masquerade as a trusted brand and attempt to fool end users and anti-phishing defenses. Since the attackers are aware that companies are likely to be using a range of software to detect phishing threats, techniques are employed to prevent their phishing emails from being detected by those solutions.
Many email protection solutions compare emails from a brand against domains known to be used by that brand to confirm that the emails are genuine. Deep sea phishing attacks counter this by using subtle changes to the brand names to avoid detection by software.
For example, if the brand American Express was being spoofed, certain anti-spam solutions could compare the sender of the email to the domains known to be used by American Express. If the domain is not recognized, the email would be rejected.
However, in a deep sea phishing attack, the subject name and sender address would replace ‘American’ with ‘Arnerican’. This slight change would enable the email to make it past spam defenses, but it would still not be obvious to many users that the email is not genuine, at least with just a casual glance at the subject line and sender address.
Inky Phish Fence has been developed to protect against these types of phishing attacks that attempt to bypass email authentication technologies. When an email is received that is suspicious, and may be an attempt to spoof a brand, Inky marks the email as suspicious and adds a strong warning that the email may not be genuine. When an email is sent and the DKIM record matches the senders, the user is given visual confirmation of the entity that sent the email and information about the reputation of the sender: A feature that no other phishing protection solution currently offers.
The firm, which is self-funded, has developed a fully functional product and is now working on marketing its solution and increasing. The Cyber Start-up Company of the Year Award has helped get the Phish Fence product recognized and establishes credibility.
“Winning Cyber Start-up Company of the Year validates the work my team has been putting in to develop Inky Fish Fence,” said Inky CEO Dave Baggett. “It’s exciting to be leading a winning team that is innovating and creating at such a fast pace.”