Enhanced Classification Method for Phishing Emails Detection

Abstract

Emails are currently the main communication method worldwide as it proven in its efficiency. Phishing emails in the other hand is one of the major threats which results in significant losses, estimated at billions of dollars. Phishing emails is a more dynamic problem, a struggle between the phishers and defenders where the phishers have more flexibility in manipulating the emails features and evading the anti-phishing techniques. Many solutions have been proposed to mitigate the phishing emails impact on the targeted sectors, but none have achieved 100% detection and accuracy. As phishing techniques are evolving, the solutions need to be evolved and generalized in order to mitigate as much as possible. This article presents a new emergent classification model based on hybrid feature selection method that combines two common feature selection methods, Information Gain and Genetic Algorithm that keep only significant and high-quality features in the final classifier. The Proposed hybrid approach achieved 98.9% accuracy rate against phishing emails dataset comprising 8266 instances and results depict enhancement by almost 4%. Furthermore, the presented technique has contributed to reducing the search space by reducing the number of selected features.

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• classification
• phishing emails
• detection
• feature selection