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The application of a novel neural network in the detection of phishing websites

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Abstract

In recent years, security incidents of website occur increasingly frequently, and this motivates us to study websites’ security. Although there are many phishing detection approaches to detect phishing websites, the detection accuracy has not been desirable. In this paper, we propose a novel phishing detection model based on a novel neural network classification method. This detection model can achieve high accu-racy and has good generalization ability by design risk minimization principle. Furthermore, the training process of the novel detection model is simple and stable by Monte Carlo algorithm. Based on testing of a set of phishing and benign websites, we have noted that this novel phishing detection model achieves the best Accuracy, True-positive rate (TPR), False-positive rate (FPR), Precision, Recall, F-measure and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) comparable to other models as Naive Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression(LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM), Radial-Basis Support Vector Machine (RSVM) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Furthermore, based upon experiments, we find that the proposed detection model can achieve a high Accuracy of 97.71% and a low FPR of 1.7%. It indicates that the proposed detection model is promising and can be effectively applied to phishing detection.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 6140-2210 and 60973137, State Grid Corporation Science and Technology Project under Grant No. SGGSKY00FJJS1700-302, Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant no. NCET-12-0250, Major National Project of High Resolution Earth Observation System under Grant no. 30-Y20A34-9010-15/17, Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with Grant no. XDA03030100, Google Research Awards and Goo-gle Faculty Award.

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Correspondence to Qingguo Zhou.

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Feng, F., Zhou, Q., Shen, Z. et al. The application of a novel neural network in the detection of phishing websites. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 15, 1865–1879 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-018-0786-3

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