• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.2752-2768
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• 2020

Phishing websites can have devastating effects on governmental, financial, and social services, as well as on individual privacy. Currently, many phishing detection solutions are evaluated using small datasets and, thus, are prone to sampling issues, such as representing legitimate websites by only high-ranking websites, which could make their evaluation less relevant in practice. Phishing detection solutions which depend only on the URL are attractive, as they can be used in limited systems, such as with firewalls. In this paper, we present a URL-only phishing detection solution based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The proposed CNN takes the URL as the input, rather than using predetermined features such as URL length. For training and evaluation, we have collected over two million URLs in a massive URL phishing detection (MUPD) dataset. We split MUPD into training, validation and testing datasets. The proposed CNN achieves approximately 96% accuracy on the testing dataset; this accuracy is achieved with URL schemes (such as HTTP and HTTPS) removed from the URL. Our proposed solution achieved better accuracy compared to an existing state-of-the-art URL-only model on a published dataset. Finally, the results of our experiment suggest keeping the CNN up-to-date for better results in practice.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.272-282
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• 2022

Between 2014 and 2019, the US lost more than 2.1 billion USD to phishing attacks, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and COVID-19 scam complaints totaled more than 1,200. Phishing attacks reflect these awful effects. Phishing websites (PWs) detection appear in the literature. Previous methods included maintaining a centralized blacklist that is manually updated, but newly created pseudonyms cannot be detected. Several recent studies utilized supervised machine learning (SML) algorithms and schemes to manipulate the PWs detection problem. URL extraction-based algorithms and schemes. These studies demonstrate that some classification algorithms are more effective on different data sets. However, for the phishing site detection problem, no widely known classifier has been developed. This study is aimed at identifying the features and schemes of SML that work best in the face of PWs across all publicly available phishing data sets. The Scikit Learn library has eight widely used classification algorithms configured for assessment on the public phishing datasets. Eight was tested. Later, classification algorithms were used to measure accuracy on three different datasets for statistically significant differences, along with the Welch t-test. Assemblies and neural networks outclass classical algorithms in this study. On three publicly accessible phishing datasets, eight traditional SML algorithms were evaluated, and the results were calculated in terms of classification accuracy and classifier ranking as shown in tables 4 and 8. Eventually, on severely unbalanced datasets, classifiers that obtained higher than 99.0 percent classification accuracy. Finally, the results show that this could also be adapted and outperforms conventional techniques with good precision.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.1916-1934
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• 2023

The phishing attack is a malicious emerging threat on the internet where the hackers try to access the user credentials such as login information or Internet banking details through pirated websites. Using that information, they get into the original website and try to modify or steal the information. The problem with traditional defense systems like firewalls is that they can only stop certain types of attacks because they rely on a fixed set of principles to do so. As a result, the model needs a client-side defense mechanism that can learn potential attack vectors to detect and prevent not only the known but also unknown types of assault. Feature selection plays a key role in machine learning by selecting only the required features by eliminating the irrelevant ones from the real-time dataset. The proposed model uses Hyperparameter Optimized Artificial Neural Networks (H-ANN) combined with a Hybrid Firefly and Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm (H-FFGWO) to detect and block phishing websites in Internet of Things(IoT) Applications. In this paper, the H-FFGWO is used for the feature selection from phishing datasets ISCX-URL, Open Phish, UCI machine-learning repository, Mendeley website dataset and Phish tank. The results showed that the proposed model had an accuracy of 98.07%, a recall of 98.04%, a precision of 98.43%, and an F1-Score of 98.24%.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.617-625
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• 2018

Phishing website has become a crucial concern in cyber security applications. It is performed by fraudulently deceiving users with the aim of obtaining their sensitive information such as bank account information, credit card, username, and password. The threat has led to huge losses to online retailers, e-business platform, financial institutions, and to name but a few. One way to build anti-phishing detection mechanism is to construct classification algorithm based on machine learning techniques. The objective of this paper is to compare different classifier ensemble approaches, i.e. random forest, rotation forest, gradient boosted machine, and extreme gradient boosting against single classifiers, i.e. decision tree, classification and regression tree, and credal decision tree in the case of website phishing. Area under ROC curve (AUC) is employed as a performance metric, whilst statistical tests are used as baseline indicator of significance evaluation among classifiers. The paper contributes the existing literature on making a benchmark of classifier ensembles for web phishing detection.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.99-104
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• 2018

Phishing website has become a crucial concern in cyber security applications. It is performed by fraudulently deceiving users with the aim of obtaining their sensitive information such as bank account information, credit card, username, and password. The threat has led to huge losses to online retailers, e-business platform, financial institutions, and to name but a few. One way to build anti-phishing detection mechanism is to construct classification algorithm based on machine learning techniques. The objective of this paper is to compare different classifier ensemble approaches, i.e. random forest, rotation forest, gradient boosted machine, and extreme gradient boosting against single classifiers, i.e. decision tree, classification and regression tree, and credal decision tree in the case of website phishing. Area under ROC curve (AUC) is employed as a performance metric, whilst statistical tests are used as baseline indicator of significance evaluation among classifiers. The paper contributes the existing literature on making a benchmark of classifier ensembles for web phishing detection.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.277-283
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• 2022

Email phishing has become very prevalent especially now that most of our dealings have become technical. The victim receives a message that looks as if it was sent from a known party and the attack is carried out through a fake cookie that includes a phishing program or through links connected to fake websites, in both cases the goal is to install malicious software on the user's device or direct him to a fake website. Today it is difficult to deploy robust cybersecurity solutions without relying heavily on machine learning algorithms. This research seeks to detect phishing emails using high-accuracy machine learning techniques. using the WEKA tool with data preprocessing we create a proposed methodology to detect emails phishing. outperformed random forest algorithm on Naïve Bayes algorithms by accuracy of 99.03 %.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.213-218
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• 2021

This paper proposes a technique for detecting a significant threat that attempts to get sensitive and confidential information such as usernames, passwords, credit card information, and more to target an individual or organization. By definition, a phishing attack happens when malicious people pose as trusted entities to fraudulently obtain user data. Phishing is classified as a type of social engineering attack. For a phishing attack to happen, a victim must be convinced to open an email or a direct message [1]. The email or direct message will contain a link that the victim will be required to click on. The aim of the attack is usually to install malicious software or to freeze a system. In other instances, the attackers will threaten to reveal sensitive information obtained from the victim. Phishing attacks can have devastating effects on the victim. Sensitive and confidential information can find its way into the hands of malicious people. Another devastating effect of phishing attacks is identity theft [1]. Attackers may impersonate the victim to make unauthorized purchases. Victims also complain of loss of funds when attackers access their credit card information. The proposed method has two major subsystems: (1) Data collection: different websites have been collected as a big data corresponding to normal and phishing dataset, and (2) distributed detection system: different artificial algorithms are used: a neural network algorithm and machine learning. The Amazon cloud was used for running the cluster with different cores of machines. The experiment results of the proposed system achieved very good accuracy and detection rate as well.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.79-90
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• 2014

User authentication based on ID and PW has been widely used. As the Internet has become a growing part of people' lives, input times of ID/PW have been increased for a variety of services. People have already learned enough to perform the authentication procedure and have entered ID/PW while ones are unconscious. This is referred to as the adaptive unconscious, a set of mental processes incoming information and producing judgements and behaviors without our conscious awareness and within a second. Most people have joined up for various websites with a small number of IDs/PWs, because they relied on their memory for managing IDs/PWs. Human memory decays with the passing of time and knowledges in human memory tend to interfere with each other. For that reason, there is the potential for people to enter an invalid ID/PW. Therefore, these characteristics above mentioned regarding of user authentication with ID/PW can lead to human vulnerabilities: people use a few PWs for various websites, manage IDs/PWs depending on their memory, and enter ID/PW unconsciously. Based on the vulnerability of human factors, a variety of information leakage attacks such as phishing and pharming attacks have been increasing exponentially. In the past, information leakage attacks exploited vulnerabilities of hardware, operating system, software and so on. However, most of current attacks tend to exploit the vulnerabilities of the human factors. These attacks based on the vulnerability of the human factor are called social-engineering attacks. Recently, malicious social-engineering technique such as phishing and pharming attacks is one of the biggest security problems. Phishing is an attack of attempting to obtain valuable information such as ID/PW and pharming is an attack intended to steal personal data by redirecting a website's traffic to a fraudulent copy of a legitimate website. Screens of fraudulent copies used for both phishing and pharming attacks are almost identical to those of legitimate websites, and even the pharming can include the deceptive URL address. Therefore, without the supports of prevention and detection techniques such as vaccines and reputation system, it is difficult for users to determine intuitively whether the site is the phishing and pharming sites or legitimate site. The previous researches in terms of phishing and pharming attacks have mainly studied on technical solutions. In this paper, we focus on human behaviour when users are confronted by phishing and pharming attacks without knowing them. We conducted an attack experiment in order to find out how many IDs/PWs are leaked from pharming and phishing attack. We firstly configured the experimental settings in the same condition of phishing and pharming attacks and build a phishing site for the experiment. We then recruited 64 voluntary participants and asked them to log in our experimental site. For each participant, we conducted a questionnaire survey with regard to the experiment. Through the attack experiment and survey, we observed whether their password are leaked out when logging in the experimental phishing site, and how many different passwords are leaked among the total number of passwords of each participant. Consequently, we found out that most participants unconsciously logged in the site and the ID/PW management dependent on human memory caused the leakage of multiple passwords. The user should actively utilize repudiation systems and the service provider with online site should support prevention techniques that the user can intuitively determined whether the site is phishing.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.127-133
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• 2021

Today, phishing attacks represent one of the biggest security threats targeting users of the digital world. They consist of an attempt to steal sensitive information, such as a user's identity or credit and debit card details, using various methods that include fake emails, fake websites, and fake social media messages. Protecting the user's security and privacy therefore becomes complex, especially when those users are children. Currently, children are participating in Internet activity more frequently than ever before. This activity includes, for example, online gaming, communication, and schoolwork. However, children tend to have a less well-developed knowledge of privacy and security concepts, compared to adults. Consequently, they often become victims of cybercrime. In this paper, the effects of security awareness on users who are children are investigated, looking at their ability to detect phishing attacks in social media. In this approach, two Experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of security awareness on WhatsApp application users in their daily communication. The results of the Experiments revealed that phishing awareness training has a significant positive effect on the ability of children using WhatsApp to identify phishing messages and thereby avoid attacks.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.297-302
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• 2021

The development of various phishing websites enables hackers to access confidential personal or financial data, thus, decreasing the trust in e-business. This paper compared the detection techniques utilizing URL-based features. To analyze and compare the performance of supervised machine learning classifiers, the machine learning classifiers were trained by using more than 11,005 phishing and legitimate URLs. 30 features were extracted from the URLs to detect a phishing or legitimate URL. Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and CatBoost classifiers were then analyzed and their performances were evaluated. The results yielded that CatBoost was much better classifier than Random Forest and Logistic Regression with up to 96% of detection accuracy.