Email phishing detection and prevention by using data mining techniques

Abstract

Social engineering has emerged as a serious threat in virtual communities and is an important means to attack information systems. The services used by today's knowledge workers prepare the base for complicated social engineering attacks. Phishing is a kind of technically generated social engineering attack and is the type of identity theft that uses the social engineering techniques and complex attack vectors to harvest financial information from unsuspecting consumers. It is a kind of attack in which phishers use spoofed emails and fraudulent web sites to trick people into giving personal information. Victims perceive these emails as trusted, while in reality they are the work of phishers interested in identity theft. Therefore, there is an urgent need for anti-phishing solutions and hereabout have been identified, a number of solutions to mitigate phishing attacks have been suggested. In this work, a phishing detection method is proposed by using machine learning and data mining techniques. Success rate of %89 has been achieved against phishing attacks coming from email messages.