Detection of Phishing Websites by Using Machine Learning-Based URL Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, with the increasing use of mobile devices, there is a growing trend to move almost all real-world operations to the cyberworld. Although this makes easy our daily lives, it also brings many security breaches due to the anonymous structure of the Internet. Used antivirus programs and firewall systems can prevent most of the attacks. However, experienced attackers target on the weakness of the computer users by trying to phish them with bogus webpages. These pages imitate some popular banking, social media, e-commerce, etc. sites to steal some sensitive information such as, user-ids, passwords, bank account, credit card numbers, etc. Phishing detection is a challenging problem, and many different solutions are proposed in the market as a blacklist, rule-based detection, anomaly-based detection, etc. In the literature, it is seen that current works tend on the use of machine learning-based anomaly detection due to its dynamic structure, especially for catching the 'zero-day' attacks. In this paper, we proposed a machine learning-based phishing detection system by using eight different algorithms to analyze the URLs, and three different datasets to compare the results with other works. The experimental results depict that the proposed models have an outstanding performance with a success rate.