Phishing as one of the most well-known cybercrime activities is a deception of online users to steal their personal or confidential information by impersonating a legitimate website. Several machine learning-based strategies have been proposed to detect phishing websites. These techniques are dependent on the features extracted from the website samples. However, few studies have actually considered efficient feature selection for detecting phishing attacks. In this work, we investigate an agreement on the definitive features which should be used in phishing detection. We apply Fuzzy Rough Set (FRS) theory as a tool to select most effective features from three benchmarked data sets. The selected features are fed into three often used classifiers for phishing detection. To evaluate the FRS feature selection in developing a generalizable phishing detection, the classifiers are trained by a separate out-of-sample data set of 14,000 website samples. The maximum F-measure gained by FRS feature selection is 95 using Random Forest classification. Also, there are 9 universal features selected by FRS over all the three data sets. The F-measure value using this universal feature set is approximately 93 which is a comparable result in contrast to the FRS performance. Since the universal feature set contains no features from third-part services, this finding implies that with no inquiry from external sources, we can gain a faster phishing detection which is also robust toward zero-day attacks.
Internet has become an essential component of our everyday social and financial activities. Nevertheless, internet users may be vulnerable to different types of web threats, which may cause financial damages, identity theft, loss of private information, brand reputation damage and loss of customer's confidence in e-commerce and online banking. Phishing is considered as a form of web threats that is defined as the art of impersonating a website of an honest enterprise aiming to obtain confidential information such as usernames, passwords and social security number. So far, there is no single solution that can capture every phishing attack. In this article, we proposed an intelligent model for predicting phishing attacks based on artificial neural network particularly self-structuring neural networks. Phishing is a continuous problem where features significant in determining the type of web pages are constantly changing. Thus, we need to constantly improve the network structure in order to cope with these changes. Our model solves this problem by automating the process of structuring the network and shows high acceptance for noisy data, fault tolerance and high prediction accuracy. Several experiments were conducted in our research, and the number of epochs differs in each experiment. From the results, we find that all produced structures have high generalization ability. The existing anti-phishing approaches use the blacklist methods or features based machine learning techniques. Blacklist methods fail to detect new phishing attacks and produce high false positive rate. Moreover, existing machine learning based methods extract features from the third party, search engine, etc. Therefore, they are complicated, slow in nature, and not fit for the real-time environment. To solve this problem, this paper presents a machine learning based novel anti-phishing approach that extracts the features from client side only. We have examined the various attributes of the phishing and legitimate websites in depth and identified nineteen outstanding features to distinguish phishing websites from legitimate ones. These nineteen features are extracted from the URL and source code of the website and do not depend on any third party, which makes the proposed approach fast, reliable, and intelligent. Compared to other methods, the proposed approach has relatively high accuracy in detection of phishing websites as it achieved 99.39 true positive rate and 99.09 of overall detection accuracy. Phishing is increasing dramatically with the development of modern technologies and the global worldwide computer networks. This results in the loss of customer’s confidence in e-commerce and online banking, financial damages, and identity theft. Phishing is fraudulent effort aims to acquire sensitive information from users such as credit card credentials, and social security number. In this article, we propose a model for predicting phishing attacks based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN). A Feed Forward Neural Network trained by Back Propagation algorithm is developed to classify websites as phishing or legitimate. The suggested model shows high acceptance ability for noisy data, fault tolerance and high prediction accuracy with respect to false positive and false negative rates.