Phishing URL Detection Through Top-Level Domain Analysis: A Descriptive Approach

Christou, Orestis; Pitropakis, Nikolaos; Papadopoulos, Pavlos; Mckeown, Sean; Buchanan, William J

Abstract

Phishing is considered to be one of the most prevalent cyber-attacks because of its immense flexibility and alarmingly high success rate. Even with adequate training and high situational awareness, it can still be hard for users to continually be aware of the URL of the website they are visiting. Traditional detection methods rely on blacklists and content analysis, both of which require time-consuming human verification. Thus, there have been attempts focusing on the predictive filtering of such URLs. This study aims to develop a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent URLs and be used within the Splunk platform. Inspired from similar approaches in the literature, we trained the SVM and Random Forests algorithms using malicious and benign datasets found in the literature and one dataset that we created. We evaluated the algorithms' performance with precision and recall reaching up to 85% precision and 87% recall in the case of Random Forests while SVM achieved up to 90% precision and 88% recall using only descriptive features.

Citation

Christou, O., Pitropakis, N., Papadopoulos, P., Mckeown, S., & Buchanan, W. J. (2020). Phishing URL Detection Through Top-Level Domain Analysis: A Descriptive Approach. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (289-298). https://doi.org/10.5220/0008902202890298

• Conference Name: ICISSP 2020
• Conference Location: Valletta, Malta
• Start Date: Feb 25, 2020
• End Date: Feb 27, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Dec 3, 2019
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Jan 9, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 12, 2020
• Publisher: Scitepress Digital Library
• Volume: 1
• Pages: 289-298
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
• ISBN: 978-989-758-399-5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5220/0008902202890298
• Keywords: Phishing Detection; Machine Learning; Domain Names; URL
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2461692
• Publisher URL: http://www.icissp.org/