GuardSec: A Multi-Modal Web Platform for Real-Time Digital Fraud Detection, Entity Verification, and Connection Security Analysis in the African Context

TL;DR

GuardSec is an accessible, real-time web platform designed for African users to verify digital threats and assess their own connection security without technical expertise.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, deployable platform tailored to the African context, integrating multi-modal threat verification and personal connection auditing.

Findings

Users can verify URLs, phone numbers, and emails in under five seconds.

The platform provides real-time analysis of user connection security and exposure.

Gilda offers plain-language security advice and personalized threat assessments.

Abstract

Online fraud in Africa has reached an epidemic scale. The few cybersecurity tools that exist are out of reach for ordinary citizens, built almost exclusively for SOC analysts and technically literate users sitting on stable broadband. That mismatch isn't accidental. It's what happens when a research culture rewards benchmark numbers and treats deployability, accessibility, and local threat context as someone else's problem. We present \textit{GuardSec}, a production-deployed web platform for real-time multi-modal threat verification, built from the start around the African user. Anyone with a browser can assess the legitimacy of URLs, websites, phone numbers, email addresses, and business entities in under five seconds. No registration. No API key. No prerequisite knowledge of cybersecurity. The platform's most distinctive component is \textit{Mon Empreinte} (My Footprint), a real-time audit of the user's own connection and digital exposure: it analyses the visitor's IP address, geolocation, ISP identity, connection type, device fingerprint, browser configuration, and twelve security indicators covering network integrity, tracking exposure, and anonymisation status. With this in hand, GuardSec becomes more than a passive checker; the user can see whether their own connection is being tracked or exposed, not just whether some external entity is dangerous. The platform also embeds \textit{Gilda}, a context-aware conversational security assistant that answers questions about digital threats in plain language and offers personalised recommendations on demand.