An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
As my colleague Jason English noted in his last year’s SiliconAngle article about RSAC 2025, MirrorTab blocks in-browser attacks by executing HTML and JavaScript on a protected server instead of in the browser, streaming the resulting pixels to the user’s session.
This approach presents malicious code from taking over a browser session.
However, the “weak link” is all too often the URL that takes someone to a malicious website, phishing scam, or social engineering site.
We can add as many automated software based protections as possible, but it won’t prevent humans from falling prey to identity theft schemes or executing fraudulent transactions.
To assist with this human aspect of the security challenge, the MirrorTab now offers a product called Haven as a “friendly guide” to flag malicious and suspicious URLs.
Because it’s not easy to visually identify a malicious URL, Haven offers a free Phishing Quiz, which challenges you to identify which of a list of similar looking URLs is secure or insecure. If nothing else, this is a great training exercise and highlights how difficult it can be to visually spot an insecure URL. (Haven is also free for personal use.)
The quiz helps illustrates the value of Haven’s browser extension, which automatically flags suspicious URLs, either by recognizing a suspicious pattern or checking its list of malicious URLs. Once Haven flags a suspicious URL, the user can avoid clicking on it.
Intellyx Hot Take: MirrorTab’s approach protects against in-browser attacks, but it doesn’t prevent users clicking on malicious URLs, which often are very difficult to spot. Kudos to them for offering Haven to close this gap.
Intellyx Cold Take: The concept of Haven is similar to Merena, which we recently awarded. Their analogy is getting people to use seat belts, which requires consumers to be aware of the dangers and convince them to adopt protection. This is a challenge for Haven as well.
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