Phishing protection company SlashNext Inc. today announced the launch of Project Phantom, a new virtual stealth mode browser that offers advanced URL analysis and threat detection to its customers.

Project Phantom is being offered alongside SlashNext’s messaging security platform and is designed to see through obfuscation techniques commonly used by threat actors. The browser also delivers enhanced protection against phishing and malware for customers.

The new offering seeks to address the issue wherein well-intentioned technologies designed to verify human interactions, such as CAPTCHAs, are being exploited by threat actors to block security services from analyzing phishing sites.

In one example, Cloudflare Inc.’s Turnstile Services and similar CAPTCHA solutions, which are designed to improve user experience and verify human interactions, are commonly exploited as obfuscation techniques. CAPTCHAs are also being used to block crawlers employed by security services from accessing and analyzing phishing sites.

By offering a virtual stealth mode browser, SlashNext says, its Project Phantom bypasses the obfuscation techniques and delivers enhanced threat detection and protection against phishing and malware.

“This virtual stealth browser behaves exactly as a human user, interacting with CAPTCHAs to access phishing and other malicious content hiding behind these barriers for AI analysis,” said Chief Executive Patrick Harr, who claimed the company has seen a tenfold increase in its threat detection rate.

SlashNext was previously in the news in May when it unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered spam and “graymail” service that reduces unwanted emails and improves user productivity. Called SlashNext GenAI for Spam and Graymail, the service uses a set of unique AI classifiers trained to identify different categories of spam and unwanted graymail — such as marketing ads, sales outreach, newsletters and announcements — to reduce threats embedded in these types of emails and drive productivity gains for users and security operations center teams.

SlashNext is a venture-capital-backed startup that has raised $43 million over two rounds, according to data from Tracxn. Investors in the company include Alter Venture Partners LP, Norwest Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital LP and Telia Company AB.

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