TORPEDO add-on for Thunderbird

30.05.2016

New add-on helps users to detect phishing emails

Unfortunately technical measures cannot detect all phishing emails in order to divert them before they arrive in your inbox so you will inevitably receive some of these emails from time to time. If you want to be certain about whether an email is a phish you have to check the link very carefully.

TORPEDO displays the destination web address in a dialog box (a tooltip box) when you hover over a link with your mouse. The tooltip highlights the so-called domain of the link because this is the only relevant part to be used when you decide whether the web address is legitimate or not.

Because it is sometimes difficult to check the domain, TORPEDO offers extra information and tips to guide examination of the URL. Furthermore the tooltip frame is coloured to provide an extra signal. On top of that you can set the activation delay, how much time you would like to check the domain before you can click on it.

You can download TORPEDO from the official Mozilla add-on store.

The add-on was developed in cooperation between three research groups:

Results of a first evaluation will be published shortly by Springer and will be presented by Prof. Melanie Volkamer at the IFIP Sec Conference.