Gmail Update Uses AI to Battle Spam and Phishing

Gmail just got a bit safer.

Google’s latest update of its popular e-mail service includes a handful of new security features that protect Gmail users from spam and phishing messages with more than 99.9 percent accuracy.

The new security features — early phishing detection, click-time warnings for malicious links, unintended external reply warnings and built-in defenses against new threats — integrate with Google Safe Browsing machine learning technologies for finding and flagging phishy and suspicious URLs.

“These new models combine a variety of techniques such as reputation and similarity analysis on URLs, allowing us to generate new URL click-time warnings for phishing and malware links,” Google said in a blog post. “As we find new patterns, our models adapt more quickly than manual systems ever could, and get better with time.”

Gmail can now block millions of other types of spammy e-mails that can harm users. Thanks to its new built-in defenses against ransomware and polymorphic malware, Gmail can detect new threats by collecting thousands of spam, malware and ransomware signals with e-mail attachments that could be threats based on signals and sender signatures.

The update also includes new warnings for employees to prevent data loss.

“Now, if you try to respond to someone outside of your company domain, you’ll receive a quick warning to make sure you intended to send that e-mail,” Google said. “And because Gmail has contextual intelligence, it knows if the recipient is an existing contact or someone you interact with regularly, to avoid displaying warnings unnecessarily.”

Jennifer Cowan is the Managing Editor for SiteProNews.

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