VORTEX: Visual Phishing DetectiOns aRe Through EXplanations

Abstract

Phishing attacks reached a record high in 2022, as reported by the Anti-Phishing Work Group, following an upward trend accelerated during the pandemic. Attackers employ increasingly sophisticated tools in their attempts to deceive unaware users into divulging confidential information. Recently, the research community has turned to the utilization of screenshots of legitimate and malicious websites to identify the brands that attackers aim to impersonate. In the field of Computer Vision, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been employed to analyze the visual rendering of websites, addressing the problem of phishing detection. However, along with the development of these new models, arose the need to understand their inner workings and the rationale behind each prediction. Answering the question, “How is this website attempting to steal the identity of a well-known brand?” becomes crucial when protecting end-users from such threats. In cybersecurity, the application of explainable AI (XAI) is an emerging approach that aims to answer such questions. In this article, we propose VORTEX, a phishing website detection solution equipped with the capability to explain how a screenshot attempts to impersonate a specific brand. We conduct an extensive analysis of XAI methods for the phishing detection problem and demonstrate that VORTEX provides meaningful explanations regarding the detection results. Additionally, we evaluate the robustness of our model against Adversarial Example attacks. We adapt these attacks to the VORTEX architecture and evaluate their efficacy across multiple models and datasets. Our results show that VORTEX achieves superior accuracy compared to previous models, and learns semantically meaningful patterns to provide actionable explanations about phishing websites. Finally, VORTEX demonstrates an acceptable level of robustness against adversarial example attacks.