MacPaw introduces on-device hacking monitoring to improve mac protection.

MacPaw enhances macOS security with on-device phishing protection
MacPaw has released its latest research, which introduces a real-time, on-device phishing detection system. This will improve Mac users’ security. Ivan Petrukha will present research on the system at the 14th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security on 12 July. Moonlock, MacPaw’s cybersecurity division, developed the system to overcome traditional anti-phishing limits with immediate, device-based detection. Moonlock’s device-based solution detects phishing sites instantly by using a visual content analysis based on reference. The system relies upon local machine learning models to ensure that user data remains on the device, and enhance privacy. The system uses macOS-specific resources to process live screen captures quickly while maintaining high accuracy. It also consumes low resources — less than 84MB RAM and 16% of an Apple M1 processor’s CPU core. MacPaw’s solution achieved 95.7% accuracy and 87.7% memory on a dataset containing 50,000 web pages. Phishing is an attack method in which malicious actors impersonate a legitimate entity to trick people into divulging sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers. These attacks are often carried out through deceptive emails or websites that look trustworthy but are actually designed to steal data and install malware on a victim’s device. Workflow of the detection methodAs phishing methods become more sophisticated, traditional detection systems struggle to keep pace, making real-time solutions on devices increasingly important for robust cybersecurity. Blacklist-based solutions are prone to update delays, classification based approaches have difficulty with obfuscation and reference based methods rely on slow external databases. The system of Petrukha operates in real-time and directly on the device. This eliminates delays and enhances security. It can be adapted for iOS and other platforms, including email and messaging. Mac users may not be able to benefit from MacPaw’s phishing detection software, but it has other apps, such as CleanMyMac X, that can act as a malware detector, among other features. CleanMyMac X is compatible with macOS 10.13 and later.