Five-tier barrier anti-phishing scheme using hybrid approach

ABSTRACT

Though hoaxing people to make financial benefits is an old idea, phishers have realized that social engineering tools for web attacks are relatively easy to execute and are highly profitable over the Internet. One of the threatening criminal activities is phishing, in which the phishers trap users into revealing their identities and financial information to a fraudulent website. Researchers have proposed a number of anti-phishing techniques based on blacklist, whitelist, and visual similarity, but the major disadvantage with such approaches is that they are slow techniques with high false positive rates. For robust detection of phishing attacks, this article uses fundamentals of heuristic factors and a whitelist. The article proposes a safeguard scheme referred as the five-tier barrier hybrid approach. Input to the five-tier barrier is a uniform resource locator (URL), and output of the application is a status of the page (“Secure Connection” representing a legitimate URL, “Phishing Alert” representing phishing URL, and “Query Page” representing that the webpage needs to be processed further/failure of JSoup connection). In comparison to a blacklist, the five-tier barrier is competent in detecting zero-hour phishing attacks, and it is much faster than visual similarity–based anti-phishing techniques.