PhishForFish

Inspiration

Victims to phishing scams lose millions each year. The email genres span from fake security alerts and warnings, fake bills, to tax refund scams. As university students, we were inspired after experiencing the unrelenting flow of fake job offers and "URGENT INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITIES" (often paying $400/week with less than 10 hours of work!) and ineffective university trainings.

What it does

PhishForFish is a chrome extension that warns and educates users about phishing emails. It scans each email that opens, highlights suspicious phrases on the page, and displays a short, unique message specific to the contents of the page and what could be a red flag.

How we built it

We used native HTML/CSS/JS for the chrome extension and related functions. To generate output, we created an Python API on Flask that receives an input of email, email subject, and email body to determine the validity of the email. We also called the OpenAI API to generate a response in a JSON list.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues extracting and modifying HTML from our various JS files since the HTML structure of emails across platforms is convoluted and varies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating product for a relevant issue for college students!

What we learned

Neither of us had never created a Chrome Extension before– it was fascinating to see everything in almost live time and to use Google's DevTools to debug.