Rule-Based Phishing Attack Detection

The World Wide Web has become the hotbed of a multi-billion dollar underground economy among cyber criminals whose victims range from individual Internet users to large corporations and even government organizations. As phishing attacks are increasingly being used by criminals to facilitate their cyber schemes, it is important to develop effective phishing detection tools. In this paper, we propose a rule-based method to detect phishing webpages. We first study a number of phishing websites to examine various tactics employed by phishers and generate a rule set based on observations. We then use Decision Tree and Logistic Regression learning algorithms to apply the rules and achieve 95-99% accuracy, with a false positive rate of 0.5-1.5% and modest false negatives. Thus, it is demonstrated that our rulebased method for phishing detection achieves performance comparable to learning machine based methods, with the great advantage of understandable rules derived from experience. KeywordsPhishing attack, phishing website, rule-based, machine learning, phishing detection, decision tree