Phishing URL Detection using Machine Learning

Abstract

Abstract: Phishing attacks continue to pose a major threat for computer system defenders, often forming the first step in a multistage attack. There have been great strides made in phishing detection; however,some phishing emails appear to pass through filters by making simple structural and semantic changes to the messages. We tackle this problem through the use of a machine learning classifier operating on a large corpus of phishing and legitimate emails. We design a system to extract features, elevating some to higherlevel feature, that are meant to defeat common phishing email detection strategies. This paper presents an approach to detect phishing URLs in an efficient way based on URL features only. For detecting the phishing URLs SVM classifier is used. The performances are evaluated for different size of datasets using different number of features. The results are compared with other machine learning classification techniques. The proposed system is able to detect phishing websites using URL features only.