Enhanced Analysis Approach to Detect Phishing Attacks during COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

Public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic since March 2020 have led to lockdowns and social distancing in most countries around the world, with a shift from the traditional work environment to virtual one. Employees have been encouraged to work from home where possible to slow down the viral infection. The massive increase in the volume of professional activities executed online has posed a new context for cybercrime, with the increase in the number of emails and phishing websites. Phishing attacks have been broadened and extended through years of pandemics COVID-19. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting phishing Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) applying the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), a fast and highly accurate phishing classifier system. Comparative analysis of the GRU classification system indicates better accuracy (98.30%) than other classifier systems.