PhishDump: A multi-model ensemble based technique for the detection of phishing sites in mobile devices

Abstract

Phishing is a technique in which the attackers trick the online users to reveal the sensitive information by creating the phishing sites which look similar to that of legitimate sites. There exist many techniques to detect phishing sites in desktop computers. In recent years, the number of mobile users accessing the web has increased which lead to a rise in the number of attacks in mobile devices. Existing techniques designed for desktop computers may not be suitable for mobile devices due to their hardware limitations such as RAM, Screen size, low computational power etc. In this paper, we propose a mobile application named PhishDump to classify the legitimate and phishing websites in mobile devices. PhishDump is based on the multi-model ensemble of Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. As PhishDump focuses on the extraction of features from URL, it has several advantages over existing works such as fast computation, language independence and robust to accidental download of malwares. From the experimental analysis, we observed that our proposed multi-model ensemble outperformed traditional LSTM character and word-level models. PhishDump performed better than the existing baseline models with an accuracy of 97.30% on our dataset and 98.50% on the benchmark dataset. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.