A novel approach for phishing detection using URL-based heuristic

Abstract

Together with the growth of e-commerce transaction, Phishing - the act of stealing personal information - rises in quantity and quality. The phishers try to make fake-sites look similar to legitimate sites in terms of interface and uniform resource locator (URL) address. Therefore, the numbers of victim have been increasing due to inefficient methods using blacklist to detect phishing. This paper proposes a new phishing detection approach based on the features of URL. Specifically, the proposed method focuses on the similarity of phishing site's URL and legitimate site's URL. In addition, the ranking of site is also considered as an important factor to decide whether the site is a phishing site. The proposed technique is evaluated with a dataset of 11,660 phishing sites and 5,000 legitimate sites. The results show that the technique can detect over 97% phishing sites.