High Accuracy Phishing Detection Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

The persistent growth in phishing and the rising volume of phishing websites has led to individuals and organizations worldwide becoming increasingly exposed to various cyber-attacks. Consequently, more effective phishing detection is required for improved cyber defence. Hence, in this paper we present a deep learning-based approach to enable high accuracy detection of phishing sites. The proposed approach utilizes convolutional neural networks (CNN) for high accuracy classification to distinguish genuine sites from phishing sites. We evaluate the models using a dataset obtained from 6,157 genuine and 4,898 phishing websites. Based on the results of extensive experiments, our CNN based models proved to be highly effective in detecting unknown phishing sites. Furthermore, the CNN based approach performed better than traditional machine learning classifiers evaluated on the same dataset, reaching 98.2% phishing detection rate with an F1-score of 0.976. The method presented in this pa-per compares favourably to the state-of-the art in deep learning based phishing website detection

Deep Learning for Phishing Detection: Taxonomy, Current Challenges and Future Directions

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme under Grant FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1; and in part by the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, through SPEV project under Grant 2102/2022.Phishing has become an increasing concern and captured the attention of end-users as well as security experts. Existing phishing detection techniques still suffer from the de ciency in performance accuracy and inability to detect unknown attacks despite decades of development and improvement. Motivated to solve these problems, many researchers in the cybersecurity domain have shifted their attention to phishing detection that capitalizes on machine learning techniques. Deep learning has emerged as a branch of machine learning that becomes a promising solution for phishing detection in recent years. As a result, this study proposes a taxonomy of deep learning algorithm for phishing detection by examining 81 selected papers using a systematic literature review approach. The paper rst introduces the concept of phishing and deep learning in the context of cybersecurity. Then, taxonomies of phishing detection and deep learning algorithm are provided to classify the existing literature into various categories. Next, taking the proposed taxonomy as a baseline, this study comprehensively reviews the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques and analyzes their advantages as well as disadvantages. Subsequently, the paper discusses various issues that deep learning faces in phishing detection and proposes future research directions to overcome these challenges. Finally, an empirical analysis is conducted to evaluate the performance of various deep learning techniques in a practical context, and to highlight the related issues that motivate researchers in their future works. The results obtained from the empirical experiment showed that the common issues among most of the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms are manual parameter-tuning, long training time, and de cient detection accuracy.Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, through SPEV project 2102/202

A review of phishing email detection approaches with deep learning algorithm implementation

Phishing email is designed to mimics the legitimate emails to fool the victim into revealing their confidential information for the phisher's benefit. There have been many approaches in detecting phishing emails but the whole solution is still needed as the weaknesses of the previous and current approaches are being manipulated by phishers to make phishing attack works. This paper provides an organized guide to present the wide state of phishing attack generally and phishing email specifically. This paper also categorizes machine learning into shallow learning and deep learning, followed by related works in each category with their contributions and drawbacks. The main objective of this review is to uncover the utility of machine learning in general, and deep learning in particular, in order to detect phishing email by studying the literature. This will provide an insight of the phishing issue, the alternatives prior to the phishing email detection and the contrast of machine learning and deep learning approaches in detecting phishing emails

Detecting Cloud-Based Phishing Attacks by Combining Deep Learning Models

Web-based phishing attacks nowadays exploit popular cloud web hosting services and apps such as Google Sites and Typeform for hosting their attacks. Since these attacks originate from reputable domains and IP addresses of the cloud services, traditional phishing detection methods such as IP reputation monitoring and blacklisting are not very effective. Here we investigate the effectiveness of deep learning models in detecting this class of cloud-based phishing attacks. Specifically, we evaluate deep learning models for three phishing detection methods--LSTM model for URL analysis, YOLOv2 model for logo analysis, and triplet network model for visual similarity analysis. We train the models using well-known datasets and test their performance on phishing attacks in the wild. Our results qualitatively explain why the models succeed or fail. Furthermore, our results highlight how combining results from the individual models can improve the effectiveness of detecting cloud-based phishing attacks

Intelligent Phishing Detection Scheme Using Deep Learning Algorithms

Purpose: Phishing attacks have evolved in recent years due to high-tech-enabled economic growth worldwide. The rise in all types of fraud loss in 2019 has been attributed to the increase in deception scams and impersonation, as well as to sophisticated online attacks such as phishing. The global impact of phishing attacks will continue to intensify, and thus, a more efficient phishing detection method is required to protect online user activities. To address this need, this study focussed on the design and development of a deep learning-based phishing detection solution that leveraged the universal resource locator and website content such as images, text and frames. Design/methodology/approach: Deep learning techniques are efficient for natural language and image classification. In this study, the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithm were used to build a hybrid classification model named the intelligent phishing detection system (IPDS). To build the proposed model, the CNN and LSTM classifier were trained by using 1m universal resource locators and over 10,000 images. Then, the sensitivity of the proposed model was determined by considering various factors such as the type of feature, number of misclassifications and split issues. Findings: An extensive experimental analysis was conducted to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the IPDS in detecting phishing web pages and phishing attacks when applied to large data sets. The results showed that the model achieved an accuracy rate of 93.28% and an average detection time of 25 s. Originality/value: The hybrid approach using deep learning algorithm of both the CNN and LSTM methods was used in this research work. On the one hand, the combination of both CNN and LSTM was used to resolve the problem of a large data set and higher classifier prediction performance. Hence, combining the two methods leads to a better result with less training time for LSTM and CNN architecture, while using the image, frame and text features as a hybrid for our model detection. The hybrid features and IPDS classifier for phishing detection were the novelty of this study to the best of the authors' knowledge

Phishing Webpage Classification via Deep Learning-Based Algorithms: An Empirical Study

This work was supported/funded by the Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1). The authors sincerely thank Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) under Research University Grant Vot-20H04, Malaysia Research University Network (MRUN) Vot 4L876, for the completion of the research. Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, SPEV project Grant Number: 2102/2021.Phishing detection with high-performance accuracy and low computational complexity has always been a topic of great interest. New technologies have been developed to improve the phishing detection rate and reduce computational constraints in recent years. However, one solution is insufficient to address all problems caused by attackers in cyberspace. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to analyze the performance of various deep learning algorithms in detecting phishing activities. This analysis will help organizations or individuals select and adopt the proper solution according to their technological needs and specific applications’ requirements to fight against phishing attacks. In this regard, an empirical study was conducted using four different deep learning algorithms, including deep neural network (DNN), convolutional neural network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU). To analyze the behaviors of these deep learning architectures, extensive experiments were carried out to examine the impact of parameter tuning on the performance accuracy of the deep learning models. In addition, various performance metrics were measured to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of DL models in detecting phishing activities. The results obtained from the experiments showed that no single DL algorithm achieved the best measures across all performance metrics. The empirical findings from this paper also manifest several issues and suggest future research directions related to deep learning in the phishing detection domain.Ministry of Higher Education under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme FRGS/1/2018/ICT04/UTM/01/1Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Vot-20H04Malaysia Research University Network (MRUN) 4L876Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, SPEV project 2102/2021

Comparison of ensemble simple feed forward neural network and deep learning neural network on Phishing Detection

Phishing attack is one of wide spread cybercrimes due to the advancement of the Internet. There are many forms of phishing attack and the most common one is through email. The attacker tries to pretend by sending email from an official organization or body to deceive the user in giving in their credential user name and password. The username and password are then used for malicious purpose. Many methods have been used to detect these phishing attacks; however, the attack evolved too quickly to be solved by manual approach. Therefore, automated phishing detection through artificial intelligence approach would be more feasible. In this paper, a comparison study for phishing detection between two neural networks which are the feedforward neural network and the deep learning neural network is carried out. The result is empirically evaluated to determine which method performs better in phishing detection

Email phishing detection with BLSTM and word embeddings

The paper presents the email phishing detection method that uses BLSTM as a deep learning model. For feature extraction word embeddings ahs been used. Presented results demonstrate high accuracy and precision

Deep Learning Multi-Agent Model for Phishing Cyber-attack Detection

Phishing attacks have become one of the most prominent cyber threats in recent times, which poses a significant risk to the security of organizations and individuals. Therefore, detecting such Cyber attacks has become crucial to ensure a secure digital environment. In this regard, deep learning techniques have shown promising results for the detection of phishing attacks due to their ability to learn and extract features from raw data. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based approach to detecting phishing attacks by using a combination of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Our proposed model extracts features from the URL and email content to detect phishing attempts. We evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world dataset and achieve an accuracy of over 95%. The results indicate that the proposed approach can effectively detect phishing attacks and can be utilized in real-world applications to ensure a secure digital environment