Phishing Detection: A Literature Survey

TLDR

Phishing exploits human vulnerabilities, spreads through user weaknesses, and lacks a single solution, necessitating multiple mitigation techniques. The paper surveys recent phishing mitigation techniques, offering a high‑level overview of detection, offensive defense, correction, and prevention categories. The authors review the literature and categorize phishing mitigation methods into detection, offensive defense, correction, and prevention.

Abstract

This article surveys the literature on the detection of phishing attacks. Phishing attacks target vulnerabilities that exist in systems due to the human factor. Many cyber attacks are spread via mechanisms that exploit weaknesses found in end-users, which makes users the weakest element in the security chain. The phishing problem is broad and no single silver-bullet solution exists to mitigate all the vulnerabilities effectively, thus multiple techniques are often implemented to mitigate specific attacks. This paper aims at surveying many of the recently proposed phishing mitigation techniques. A high-level overview of various categories of phishing mitigation techniques is also presented, such as: detection, offensive defense, correction, and prevention, which we belief is critical to present where the phishing detection techniques fit in the overall mitigation process.