A Survey of Intelligent Detection Designs of HTML URL Phishing Attacks

Abstract

Phishing attacks are a type of cybercrime that has grown in recent years. It is part of social engineering attacks where an attacker deceives users by sending fake messages using social media platforms or emails. Phishing attacks steal users’ information or download and install malicious software. They are hard to detect because attackers can design a phishing message that looks legitimate to a user. This message may contain a phishing URL so that even an expert can be a victim. This URL leads the victim to a fake website that steals information, such as login information, payment information, etc. Researchers and engineers work to develop methods to detect phishing attacks without the need for the eyes of experts. Even though many papers discuss HTML and URL-based phishing detection methods, there is no comprehensive survey to discuss these methods. Therefore, this paper comprehensively surveys HTML and URL phishing attacks and detection methods. We review the current state-of-art deep learning models to detect URL-based and hybrid-based phishing attacks in detail. We compare each model based on its data preprocessing, feature extraction, model design, and performance.

Keywords

• Intelligent detection
• HTML
• URL
• phishing attacks
• social engineering
• machine learning