An anti-phishing startup is rethinking its approach to protecting consumers and businesses from malicious websites with computer vision technology. Pixm's browser plug-in uses artificial intelligence to analyze websites and determine if they're impersonating a legitimate company.
Pixm was founded in 2015 to protect users from browser-based phishing attacks that appear in emails, chats, and social media. Co-founder Chris Cleveland was a graduate student studying machine learning and computer vision, which describes software that can see the same way humans can. He sought to explore how the concept could be applied to block phishing attacks.
At the time, he said, many organizations' anti-phishing tools looked for malicious URLs based on IP reputation or whether or not they'd been involved with a previous attack. Older applications could scan for signatures indicating a website was spoofing Bank of America or Wells Fargo, but only if an attack had already taken place. There was little to detect brand-new phishing threats.
"If you're protecting people by showing them the yellow tape where the old crime scene occurred, you're not actually protecting them from the initial crime," Cleveland says. "The bar is low to launch a brand-new attack. … You can do it very fast, and it takes very little knowledge."
Pixm won a pitch competition and took its tool to The Cybersecurity Factory, a program for security startups run in partnership with Highland Capital. The company was connected with a larger organization conducting anti-phishing in a Web-scanning context, scouring the Web to find attacker infrastructure and identify phishing campaigns. Soon, Pixm launched its initial product, an API th ..
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