Intelligent Methods for Accurately Detecting Phishing Websites

Abstract

With increasing technology developments, there is a massive number of websites with varying purposes. But a particular type exists within this large collection, the so-called phishing sites which aim to deceive their users. The main challenge in detecting phishing websites is discovering the techniques that have been used. Where phishers are continually improving their strategies and creating web pages that can protect themselves against many forms of detection methods. Therefore, it is very necessary to develop reliable, active and contemporary methods of phishing detection to combat the adaptive techniques used by phishers. In this paper, different phishing detection approaches are reviewed by classifying them into three main groups. Then, the proposed model is presented in two stages. In the first stage, different machine learning algorithms are applied to validate the chosen dataset and applying features selection methods on it. Thus, the best accuracy was achieved by utilizing only 20 features out of 48 features combined with Random Forest is 98.11%. While in the second stage, the same dataset is applied to various fuzzy logic algorithms. As well the experimental results from the application of Fuzzy logic algorithms were incredible. Where in applying the FURIA algorithm with only five features the accuracy rate was 99.98%. Finally, comparison and discussion of the results between applying machine learning algorithms and fuzzy logic algorithms is done. Where the performance of using fuzzy logic algorithms exceeds the use of machine learning algorithms.