Methods, systems and devices to mitigate the effects of side effect URLs in legitimate and phishing electronic messages

A computing device, comprising:

• at least one processor;
• at least one data storage device coupled to the at least one processor;
• a network interface coupled to the at least one processor and to a computer network;
• a plurality of processes spawned by said at least one processor, the processes including processing logic for:
• using the network interface, receiving an address of a resource over the computer network, and storing the received address of the resource in the at least one data storage device,
• using a processor of the computing device, identifying at least one original parameter in the received address of the resource, the identified at least one original parameter comprising a plurality of characters;
• using a processor of the computing device, transforming the identified at least one original parameter by successively replacing at least some of the plurality of characters thereof with at least one of a random character of a same type of a plurality of predetermined types and another character of the same type obtained by carrying out a predetermined operation thereon, to generate at least one transformed parameter;
• using a processor of the computing device, reassembling the address of the resource by substituting the at least one transformed parameter for the at least one original parameter;
• and
• using the processor of the computing device and the network interface of the computing device, accessing the resource pointed to by the reassembled address of the resource over the computer network only when a number of the successive replacements is at least equal to a predetermined minimum number of transformations.

A tangible, non-transitory machine-readable data storage device having data stored thereon representing sequences of instructions which, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to:

• receive, using a network interface of the computing device, an address of a resource over the computer network and storing the received address of the resource in a memory of the computing device;
• using a processor of the computing device, identify at least one original parameter in the received address of the resource, the identified at least one original parameter comprising a plurality of characters;
• using a processor of the computing device, transform the identified at least one original parameter by successively replacing at least some of the plurality of characters thereof with at least one of a random character of a same type of a plurality of predetermined types and another character of the same type obtained by carrying out a predetermined operation thereon, to generate at least one transformed parameter;
• using a processor of the computing device, reassemble the address of the resource by substituting the at least one transformed parameter for the at least one original parameter;
• and
• using the processor of the computing device and the network interface of the computing device, access the resource pointed to by the reassembled address of the resource over the computer network only when a number of the successive replacements is at least equal to a predetermined minimum number of transformations.