Phishing website detection using intelligent data mining techniques. Design and development of an intelligent association classification mining fuzzy based scheme for phishing website detection with an emphasis on E-banking.

Abstract

Phishing techniques have not only grown in number, but also in sophistication. Phishers might have a lot of approaches and tactics to conduct a well-designed phishing attack. The targets of the phishing attacks, which are mainly on-line banking consumers and payment service providers, are facing substantial financial loss and lack of trust in Internet-based services. In order to overcome these, there is an urgent need to find solutions to combat phishing attacks. Detecting phishing website is a complex task which requires significant expert knowledge and experience. So far, various solutions have been proposed and developed to address these problems. Most of these approaches are not able to make a decision dynamically on whether the site is in fact phished, giving rise to a large number of false positives. This is mainly due to limitation of the previously proposed approaches, for example depending only on fixed black and white listing database, missing of human intelligence and experts, poor scalability and their timeliness. In this research we investigated and developed the application of an intelligent fuzzy-based classification system for e-banking phishing website detection. The main aim of the proposed system is to provide protection to users from phishers deception tricks, giving them the ability to detect the legitimacy of the websites. The proposed intelligent phishing detection system employed Fuzzy Logic (FL) model with association classification mining algorithms. The approach combined the capabilities of fuzzy reasoning in measuring imprecise and dynamic phishing features, with the capability to classify the phishing fuzzy rules. Different phishing experiments which cover all phishing attacks, motivations and deception behaviour techniques have been conducted to cover all phishing concerns. A layered fuzzy structure has been constructed for all gathered and extracted phishing website features and patterns. These have been divided into 6 criteria and distributed to 3 layers, based on their attack type. To reduce human knowledge intervention, Different classification and association algorithms have been implemented to generate fuzzy phishing rules automatically, to be integrated inside the fuzzy inference engine for the final phishing detection. Experimental results demonstrated that the ability of the learning approach to identify all relevant fuzzy rules from the training data set. A comparative study and analysis showed that the proposed learning approach has a higher degree of predictive and detective capability than existing models. Experiments also showed significance of some important phishing criteria like URL & Domain Identity, Security & Encryption to the final phishing detection rate. Finally, our proposed intelligent phishing website detection system was developed, tested and validated by incorporating the scheme as a web based plug-ins phishing toolbar. The results obtained are promising and showed that our intelligent fuzzy based classification detection system can provide an effective help for real-time phishing website detection. The toolbar successfully recognized and detected approximately 92% of the phishing websites selected from our test data set, avoiding many miss-classified websites and false phishing alarms.