Phishing detection is a critical cybersecurity task that involves the identification and neutralization of fraudulent attempts to obtain sensitive information, thereby safeguarding individuals and organizations from data breaches and financial loss. In this project, we address the constraints of traditional reference-based phishing detection by developing an LLM agent framework. This agent harnesses Large Language Models to actively fetch and utilize online information, thus providing a dynamic reference system for more accurate phishing detection. This innovation circumvents the need for a static knowledge base, offering a significant enhancement in adaptability and efficiency for automated security measures.
The project report includes an initial study and problem analysis of existing solutions, which motivated us to develop a new framework. We demonstrate the framework with LLMs simulated as agents and detail the techniques required for construction, followed by a complete implementation with a proof-of-concept as well as experiments to evaluate our solution's performance against other similar solutions. The results show that our approach has achieved with accuracy of 0.945, significantly outperforms the existing solution(DynaPhish) by 0.445. Furthermore, we discuss the limitations of our approach and suggest improvements that could make it more effective.
Overall, the proposed framework has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of current reference-based phishing detection approaches and could be adapted for real-world applications.
Blacklists are a widely-used Internet security mechanism to protect Internet users from financial scams, malicious web pages and other cyber attacks based on blacklisted URLs. In this demo, we introduce PhishChain, a transparent and decentralized system to blacklisting phishing URLs. At present, public/private domain blacklists, such as PhishTank, CryptoScamDB, and APWG, are maintained by a centralized authority, but operate in a crowd sourcing fashion to create a manually verified blacklist periodically. In addition to being a single point of failure, the blacklisting process utilized by such…
Phishing is a type of social engineering attack with an intention to steal user data, including login credentials and credit card numbers, leading to financial losses for both organisations and individuals. It occurs when an attacker, pretending as a trusted entity, lure a victim into click on a link or attachment in an email, or in a text message. Phishing is often launched via email messages or text messages over social networks. Previous research has revealed that phishing attacks can be identified just by looking at URLs. Identifying the techniques which are used by phishers to mimic a phi…
Phishing is a major problem on the Web. Despite the significant attention it has received over the years, there has been no definitive solution. While the state-of-the-art solutions have reasonably good performance, they require a large amount of training data and are not adept at detecting phishing attacks against new targets. In this paper, we begin with two core observations: (a) although phishers try to make a phishing webpage look similar to its target, they do not have unlimited freedom in structuring the phishing webpage; and (b) a webpage can be characterized by a small set of key term…
The large-scale deployment of modern phishing attacks relies on the automatic exploitation of vulnerable websites in the wild, to maximize profit while hindering attack traceability, detection and blacklisting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that specifically leverages this adversarial behavior for detection purposes. We show that phishing webpages can be accurately detected by highlighting HTML code and visual differences with respect to other (legitimate) pages hosted within a compromised website. Our system, named DeltaPhish, can be installed as part of a web applicati…
The hypothesis here states that neural network algorithms such as Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) have higher accuracy in differentiating malicious and semi-structured phishing URLs. Compared to classical machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression and Multinomial Naive Bayes, the classical algorithms rely heavily on substantial corpus data training and machine learning experts' domain knowledge to perform complex feature engineering. MLP could perform non-linear separable multi-classes classification and focus less on corpus feature training. In addition, backpropagation weight adjus…
VirusTotal (VT) provides aggregated threat intelligence on various entities including URLs, IP addresses, and binaries. It is widely used by researchers and practitioners to collect ground truth and evaluate the maliciousness of entities. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of VT URL scanning reports containing the results of 95 scanners for 1.577 Billion URLs over two years. Individual VT scanners are known to be noisy in terms of their detection and attack type classification. To obtain high quality ground truth of URLs and actively take proper actions to mitigate different typ…
Many cyberattacks start with disseminating phishing URLs. When clicking these phishing URLs, the victim's private information is leaked to the attacker. There have been proposed several machine learning methods to detect phishing URLs. However, it still remains under-explored to detect phishing URLs with evasion, i.e., phishing URLs that pretend to be benign by manipulating patterns. In many cases, the attacker i) reuses prepared phishing web pages because making a completely brand-new set costs non-trivial expenses, ii) prefers hosting companies that do not require private information and are…
Phishing attacks are among emerging security issues that recently draws significant attention in the cyber security community. There are numerous existing approaches for phishing URL detection. However, malicious URL detection is still a research hotspot because attackers can bypass newly introduced detection mechanisms by changing their tactics. This paper will introduce a transformer-based malicious URL detection model, which has significant accuracy and outperforms current detection methods. We conduct experiments and compare them with six existing classical detection models. Experiments de…
Spear Phishing is a type of cyber-attack where the attacker sends hyperlinks through email on well-researched targets. The objective is to obtain sensitive information by imitating oneself as a trustworthy website. In recent times, deep learning has become the standard for defending against such attacks. However, these architectures were designed with only defense in mind. Moreover, the attacker's perspective and motivation are absent while creating such models. To address this, we need a game-theoretic approach to understand the perspective of the attacker (Hacker) and the defender (Phishing …
PhishGuard: A Convolutional Neural Network Based Model for Detecting Phishing URLs with Explainability Analysis
Uttara University（乌拉拉大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Khulna University of Engineering and Technology (KUET)（库尔纳工程技术大学）；BRAC University（BRAC大学）；North South University（北南大学）；American International University Bangladesh (AIUB)（孟加拉国美国国际大学）
Phishing attacks continue to be a significant threat on the Internet. Prior studies show that it is possible to determine whether a website is phishing or not just by analyzing its URL more carefully. A major advantage of the URL based approach is that it can identify a phishing website even before the web page is rendered in the browser, thus avoiding other potential problems such as cryptojacking and drive-by downloads. However, traditional URL based approaches have their limitations. Blacklist based approaches are prone to zero-hour phishing attacks, advanced machine learning based approach…
Phishing attacks are an increasingly potent web-based threat, with nearly 1.5 million websites created on a monthly basis. In this work, we present the first study towards identifying such attacks through phishing reports shared by users on Twitter. We evaluated over 16.4k such reports posted by 701 Twitter accounts between June to August 2021, which contained 11.1k unique URLs, and analyzed their effectiveness using various quantitative and qualitative measures. Our findings indicate that not only do these users share a high volume of legitimate phishing URLs, but these reports contain more i…
A Lightweight Hybrid MLP-Based Framework for Real-Time Phishing URL Detection Using Structural URL Features
Department of Cyber Security Science, School of Information and Communication Technology, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria（网络安全科学系，信息与通信技术学院，联邦科技大学，米纳，尼日利亚）
Phishing is a way of stealing people's sensitive information such as username, password and banking details by disguising as a legitimate entity (i.e. email, website). Anti-phishing education considered to be vital in strengthening "human", the weakest link in information security. Previous research in anti-phishing education focuses on improving educational interventions to better interact the end user. However, one can argue that existing anti-phishing educational interventions are limited in success due to their outdated teaching content incorporated. Furthermore, teaching outdated anti-phi…
Now-a-days, cyberattacks are increasing at an unprecedented rate. Phishing is a social engineering attack which has a massive global impact, destroying the financial and economic value of corporations, government sectors and individuals. In phishing, attackers steal users personal information such as username, passwords, debit card information and so on. In order to detect zero-hour attacks and protect end-users from these attacks, various anti-phishing techniques are developed, but the end-users have to visit the websites to know whether they are safe or not, which may lead to infecting their…
Phishing and spear-phishing are typical examples of masquerade attacks since trust is built up through impersonation for the attack to succeed. Given the prevalence of these attacks, considerable research has been conducted on these problems along multiple dimensions. We reexamine the existing research on phishing and spear-phishing from the perspective of the unique needs of the security domain, which we call security challenges: real-time detection, active attacker, dataset quality and base-rate fallacy. We explain these challenges and then survey the existing phishing/spear phishing solutio…
AntiPhishStack: LSTM-based Stacked Generalization Model for Optimized Phishing URL Detection
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen College of Advanced Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学深圳先进技术学院）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；Shenzhen Polytechnic University（深圳职业技术大学）
In the growing world of the internet, the number of ways to obtain crucial data such as passwords and login credentials, as well as sensitive personal information has expanded. Page impersonation, often known as phishing, is one method of obtaining such valuable information. Phishing is one of the most straightforward forms of cyberattack for hackers and one of the simplest for victims to fall for. It can also provide hackers with everything they need to get access to their target's personal and corporate accounts. Such websites do not offer a service, but instead, gather personal information …
Phishing is considered to be one of the most prevalent cyber-attacks because of its immense flexibility and alarmingly high success rate. Even with adequate training and high situational awareness, it can still be hard for users to continually be aware of the URL of the website they are visiting. Traditional detection methods rely on blocklists and content analysis, both of which require time-consuming human verification. Thus, there have been attempts focusing on the predictive filtering of such URLs. This study aims to develop a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent URLs which can be u…
Browsers often include security features to detect phishing web pages. In the past, some browsers evaluated an unknown URL for inclusion in a list of known phishing pages. However, as the number of URLs and known phishing pages continued to increase at a rapid pace, browsers started to include one or more machine learning classifiers as part of their security services that aim to better protect end users from harm. While additional information could be used, browsers typically evaluate every unknown URL using some classifier in order to quickly detect these phishing pages. Early phishing detec…
Malicious websites are responsible for a majority of the cyber-attacks and scams today. Malicious URLs are delivered to unsuspecting users via email, text messages, pop-ups or advertisements. Clicking on or crawling such URLs can result in compromised email accounts, launching of phishing campaigns, download of malware, spyware and ransomware, as well as severe monetary losses. A machine learning based ensemble classification approach is proposed to detect malicious URLs in emails, which can be extended to other methods of delivery of malicious URLs. The approach uses static lexical features e…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre（网络安全合作研究中心）；UNSW Institute for Cyber Security（新南威尔士大学网络安全研究所）；CSIRO Data61（联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）
In this paper, we propose a feature-free method for detecting phishing websites using the Normalized Compression Distance (NCD), a parameter-free similarity measure which computes the similarity of two websites by compressing them, thus eliminating the need to perform any feature extraction. It also removes any dependence on a specific set of website features. This method examines the HTML of webpages and computes their similarity with known phishing websites, in order to classify them. We use the Furthest Point First algorithm to perform phishing prototype extractions, in order to select inst…
Continuous Multi-Task Pre-training for Malicious URL Detection and Webpage Classification
The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University（区块链与数据安全国家重点实验室，浙江大学）；Hangzhou Research Institute of Xidian University（西安电子科技大学杭州研究院）；Defence Industry Secrecy Examination and Certification Center（国防工业保密审查与认证中心）；Shenzhen MSU-BIT University（深圳MSU-BIT大学）；Yantai Research Institute, Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学烟台研究院）
EvoMail: Self-Evolving Cognitive Agents for Adaptive Spam and Phishing Email Defense
People’s Liberation Army 77606 Unit（中国人民解放军77606单位）；Field Engineering College, Army Engineering University of PLA（陆军工程大学工程学院）；College Of Software, ZhengZhou University of Light Industry（郑州轻工业大学软件学院）
A Graph-Attentive LSTM Model for Malicious URL Detection
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Dhaka University of Engineering & Technology, Gazipur, Bangladesh（达卡工程与技术大学电子与电气工程系，孟加拉国加兹ipur）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Atish Dipankar University of Science and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh（阿蒂什迪帕克尔科学技术大学计算机科学与工程系，孟加拉国达卡）；Department of Computer Science, Utah Valley University, 800 W University Pkwy, Orem, UT 84058, USA（犹他山谷大学计算机科学系，美国奥尔姆，UT 84058）
