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CatchPhish: detection of phishing websites by inspecting URLs

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Abstract

There exists many anti-phishing techniques which use source code-based features and third party services to detect the phishing sites. These techniques have some limitations and one of them is that they fail to handle drive-by-downloads. They also use third-party services for the detection of phishing URLs which delay the classification process. Hence, in this paper, we propose a light-weight application, CatchPhish which predicts the URL legitimacy without visiting the website. The proposed technique uses hostname, full URL, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) features and phish-hinted words from the suspicious URL for the classification using the Random forest classifier. The proposed model with only TF-IDF features on our dataset achieved an accuracy of 93.25%. Experiment with TF-IDF and hand-crafted features achieved a significant accuracy of 94.26% on our dataset and an accuracy of 98.25%, 97.49% on benchmark datasets which is much better than the existing baseline models.

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Notes

  1. https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/

  2. http://scikit-learn.org

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), Government of India for their support in part of the research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Security Research Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Karnataka, 575025, India

    Routhu Srinivasa Rao & Alwyn Roshan Pais

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, Karnataka, 576104, India

    Tatti Vaishnavi

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  1. Routhu Srinivasa Rao
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Correspondence to Routhu Srinivasa Rao.

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Rao, R.S., Vaishnavi, T. & Pais, A.R. CatchPhish: detection of phishing websites by inspecting URLs. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 11, 813–825 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01311-4

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