Abstract Today, the growing significance of digitization across the globe has made the cybersecurity as inevitable. There are many threats in existence to induce harm and to make illegal activities in a device or a network. Email scam or phishing is a technique that most of the hackers use as baits to infiltrate into a system. After a systematic analysis of the infiltration process, a Chrome extension application named Sniff‐Phish is developed, where the resource intensive computational tasks are performed in cloud with which we could be able to detect various categories of real‐time email scams or phishing attacks like zero‐day and spear phishing. This extension application is based upon analyzing some basic criterion of the malicious URL and duly presenting the legitimacy level of the link in the form of a report. The accuracy obtains for Sniff‐Phish is 98% and covers a wide range of phishing websites, resulting in the less false positive rate of 1.2%. Considering the zero‐day and spear phishing detection rate of Sniff‐Phish, the overall experimental results prove that the proposed system outperforms the conventional phishing detection methods.