MacPaw introduces on-device phishing detection to enhance macOS security

MacPaw’s latest research includes a real-time phishing detection system that aims to improve cybersecurity for Mac users.

Ivan Petrukha, Senior Research Engineer at MacPaw, will present the results of his research on this system at the 14th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects of Security on July 12. The system, initiated by Moonlock, the cybersecurity division of MacPaw, overcomes traditional limitations of phishing protection with instant on-device detection.

Moonlock on-device solution instantly detects phishing sites using a reference-based approach to visual content analysis. The system is based on local machine learning models, ensuring user data stays on the device and increasing privacy.

Using macOS-specific resources, the system quickly processes live screen captures while maintaining high accuracy and low resource consumption—16% of the CPU core and less than 84MB of RAM on an Apple M1 processor. MacPaw achieved 95.7% precision and 87.7% recall on a dataset of 50,000 web pages.

Phishing is a cyberattack method in which malicious actors impersonate legitimate entities to trick people into sharing sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers, and personal information. These attacks often occur through deceptive emails, websites, or messages that appear trustworthy but are designed to steal data or install malware on the victim’s device.

As phishing techniques become more sophisticated, traditional detection methods are no longer effective, making real-time, on-device solutions increasingly important for solid cybersecurity.

Blacklist-based solutions suffer from update delays, classification-based approaches suffer from obfuscation issues, and reference-based methods rely on slow external databases.

Petrukha’s system works in real time, directly on the device, eliminating these delays and increasing security. It has the potential to adapt to iOS and other applications, such as email and messaging platforms.

There’s no word yet on how Mac users can take advantage of MacPaw’s phishing detection system, but the company has apps like CleanMyMac X that act as a malware detection tool, among other features. CleanMyMac X requires macOS 10.13 or later.