Detecting Phishing Domains Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Phishing is an online threat where an attacker impersonates an authentic and trustworthy organization to obtain sensitive information from a victim. One example of such is trolling, which has long been considered a problem. However, recent advances in phishing detection, such as machine learning-based methods, have assisted in combatting these attacks. Therefore, this paper develops and compares four models for investigating the efficiency of using machine learning to detect phishing domains. It also compares the most accurate model of the four with existing solutions in the literature. These models were developed using artificial neural networks (ANNs), support vector machines (SVMs), decision trees (DTs), and random forest (RF) techniques. Moreover, the uniform resource locator’s (URL’s) UCI phishing domains dataset is used as a benchmark to evaluate the models. Our findings show that the model based on the random forest technique is the most accurate of the other four techniques and outperforms other solutions in the literature.

Keywords

• phishing detection
• machine learning
• phishing domains
• artificial neural networks
• support vector machine
• decision tree