A Comparative Analysis of Anti-Phishing Mechanisms: Email Phishing

Abstract

Phishing has created a serious threat towards internet security. Phish e-mails are used chiefly to deceive confidential information of individual and organizations. Phishing e-mails entice naive users and organizations to reveal confidential information such as, personal details, passwords, account numbers, credit card pins, etc. Phisher spread spoofed e-mails as coming from legitimate sources, phishers gain access to such sensitive information that eventually results in identity and financial losses.In this research paper,aexhaustive study is done on anti-phishing mechanism from year 2002 to 2014. A comparative analysis report of anti-phishing detection, prevention and protection mechanisms from last decade is listed. This comparativeanalysis reports the anti-phishing mechanism run on server side or client side and which vulnerable area is coverd by it. The vulnerable area is divided into three categories on the basis of email structure. The number of vulnerabilties covered by existing anti-phishing mechanisms are listed to identify the focus or unfocused vulnerability. This research paper could be said as tutorial of a existing anti-phishing research work from decade. The current work examines the effectiveness of the tools and techniques against email phishing. It aims to determine pitfalls and vulnerability of anti-phishing tools and techniques against email phishing. This work could improve the understanding of the security loopholes, the current solution space, and increase the accuracy or performance to counterfeit the phishing attack. Keywords: Phishing, E-mail phishing, Information security, web vulnerabilities, cyber-security.