TORPEDO: Tooltip-powered phishing email detection

Abstract

We propose a concept called TORPEDO to improve phish detection by providing just-in-time and just-in-place trustworthy tooltips to help people judge links embedded in emails. TORPEDO’s tooltips contain the actual URL with the domain highlighted and delay link activation for a short period, giving the person time to inspect the URL before they click. Furthermore, TORPEDO consists of an information diagram to explain phish detection. We evaluated TORPEDO in particular with respect to its effectiveness: Compared to the worst case ‘status bar’. as used in Thunderbird and Web email clients. TORPEDO performed significantly better in detecting phishes and identifying legitimate emails (85.17% versus 43.31% correct answers for phish). A proof of concept implementation is available as a Thunderbird Add-On.