Phishing Website Detection Using Machine Learning Classifiers Optimized by Feature Selection

Abstract

Security is one of the most actual topics in the online world. Lists of security threats are constantly updated. One of those threats are phishing websites. In this work, we address the problem of phishing websites classification. Three classifiers were used: K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree and Random Forest with the feature selection methods from Weka. Achieved accuracy was 100% and number of features was decreased to seven. Moreover, when we decreased the number of features, we decreased time to build models too. Time for Random Forest was decreased from the initial 2.88s and 3.05s for percentage split and 10-fold cross validation to 0.02s and 0.16s respectively.