Phishing website detection based on deep convolutional neural network and random forest ensemble learning

Abstract

Phishing has become one of the biggest and most effective cyber threats, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and millions of data breaches every year. Currently, anti-phishing techniques require experts to extract phishing sites features and use third-party services to detect phishing sites. These techniques have some limitations, one of which is that extracting phishing features requires expertise and is time-consuming. Second, the use of third-party services delays the detection of phishing sites. Hence, this paper proposes an integrated phishing website detection method based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and random forest (RF). The method can predict the legitimacy of URLs without accessing the web content or using third-party services. The proposed technique uses character embedding techniques to convert URLs into fixed-size matrices, extract features at different levels using CNN models, classify multi-level features using multiple RF classifiers, and, finally, output prediction results using a winner-take-all approach. On our dataset, a 99.35% accuracy rate was achieved using the proposed model. An accuracy rate of 99.26% was achieved on the benchmark data, much higher than that of the existing extreme model.