anglerphish

A smarter defense against smarter phishing attacks.

Anglerphish is an AI-powered Chrome extension designed to help seniors and less tech-savvy users identify suspicious messages before they click, reply, or disclose sensitive information.

Executive Summary

Phishing attacks are becoming more convincing, more personalized, and more conversational. As generative AI makes scams harder to recognize, many older adults and less technical users are left increasingly vulnerable.

Anglerphish addresses that challenge with a simple one-click workflow that analyzes suspicious messages and explains the result in clear, accessible language. It is designed not only to detect risk, but also to help users understand it.

The Problem

Traditional anti-phishing tools often rely on obvious indicators such as malicious links, attachments, or known patterns. But many modern scams do not begin that way. Some unfold gradually through trust-building conversation, making them difficult to detect with conventional filtering approaches.

This creates a serious usability and security gap for seniors and less tech-savvy users, who are often among the most targeted populations but may not have the technical confidence to evaluate suspicious messages on their own.

Our Solution

Anglerphish is a Chrome extension that helps users analyze suspicious emails and messages with a single click.

For conventional phishing attempts, it evaluates message content, sender information, and URLs using AI-driven contextual analysis. For more advanced scams, it uses a conversation simulation process to assess whether an interaction is trending toward harm, even when there is no link or attachment present.

What Sets anglerphish Apart

• AI against AI: detects phishing using contextual, AI-powered analysis.
• Conversation simulation: evaluates multi-stage scams that unfold over time.
• Built for seniors: designed around a simple, accessible one-click experience.
• Educational feedback: explains why a message appears risky.

Under the Hood

Anglerphish combines a Chrome extension frontend, a secure backend pipeline, and an AI analysis workflow that can route messages through either a direct phishing analysis path or a conversation-simulation path.

Security was built into the design from the beginning, with controls for sanitization, prompt isolation, request limits, workflow throttling, identity checks, and audit logging.

Looking Ahead

We see anglerphish evolving beyond the browser into mobile and messaging environments, with future opportunities for enterprise integrations and broader real-world deployment.

Our goal is simple: give vulnerable users a practical, understandable way to defend themselves against increasingly sophisticated scams.