A predictive model for phishing detection

Abstract

Nowadays, many anti-phishing systems are being developed to identify phishing contents in online communication systems. Despite the availability of myriads anti-phishing systems, phishing continues unabated due to inadequate detection of a zero-day attack, superfluous computational overhead and high false rates. Although Machine Learning approaches have achieved promising accuracy rate, the choice and the performance of the feature vector limit their effective detection. In this work, an enhanced machine learning-based predictive model is proposed to improve the efficiency of anti-phishing schemes. The predictive model consists of Feature Selection Module which is used for the construction of an effective feature vector. These features are extracted from the URL, webpage properties and webpage behaviour using the incremental component-based system to present the resultant feature vector to the predictive model. The proposed system uses Support Vector Machine and Naïve Bayes which have been trained on a 15-dimensional feature set. The experiments were based on datasets consisting of 2541 phishing instances and 2500 benign instances. Using 10-fold cross-validation, the experimental results indicate a remarkable performance with 0.04% False Positive and 99.96% accuracy for both SVM and NB predictive models.