Phish indicator: An indication for phishing sites

Abstract

Phishing is a simple social engineering technique that functions by creating a fake Web site, often imitating a legitimate site. Despite many antiphishing tools are developed, the phishing attacks are still a drift of trust in Internet security. In this paper, the indicator acts as an enhancement toward the usability of the cyber trust mechanisms. Here, the phish indicator is developed as a browser extension, which will detect and classify the URL as phishing or genuine site. The classification of the URL visited by the user is done using Levenshtein algorithm and some heuristic criterions. It will alert the user with a message of whether the URL visited is a phishing site or a genuine site. Thus, the indication will help whenever the user attempts to give away his information to a Web site that is considered untrusted.