On the character of phishing URLs: Accurate and robust statistical learning classifiers

R Verma, K Dyer - Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and …, 2015 - dl.acm.org
R Verma, K Dyer
Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and …, 2015dl.acm.org
Phishing attacks resulted in an estimated $3.2 billion dollars worth of stolen property in
2007, and the success rate for phishing attacks is increasing each year [17]. Phishing
attacks are becoming harder to detect and more elusive by using short time windows to
launch attacks. In order to combat the increasing effectiveness of phishing attacks, we
propose that combining statistical analysis of website URLs with machine learning
techniques will give a more accurate classification of phishing URLs. Using a two-sample …
Phishing attacks resulted in an estimated $3.2 billion dollars worth of stolen property in 2007, and the success rate for phishing attacks is increasing each year [17]. Phishing attacks are becoming harder to detect and more elusive by using short time windows to launch attacks. In order to combat the increasing effectiveness of phishing attacks, we propose that combining statistical analysis of website URLs with machine learning techniques will give a more accurate classification of phishing URLs. Using a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test along with other features we were able to accurately classify 99.3% of our dataset, with a false positive rate of less than 0.4%. Thus, accuracy of phishing URL classification can be greatly increased through the use of these statistical measures.
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