Phishing Attacks Detection Using Ensemble Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Phishing, an Internet fraud where individuals are deceived into revealing critical personal and account information, poses a significant risk to both consumers and web-based institutions. Data indicates a persistent rise in phishing attacks. Moreover, these fraudulent schemes are progressively becoming more intricate, thereby rendering them more challenging to identify. Hence, it is imperative to utilize sophisticated algorithms to address this issue. Machine learning is a highly effective approach for identifying and uncovering these harmful behaviors. Machine learning (ML) approaches can identify common characteristics in most phishing assaults. In this paper, we propose an ensemble approach and compare it with six machine learning techniques to determine the type of website and whether it is normal or not based on two phishing datasets. After that, we used the normalization technique on the dataset to transform the range of all the features into the same range. The findings of this paper for all algorithms are as follows in the first dataset based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively: Decision Tree (DT) (0.964, 0.961, 0.976, 0.968), Random Forest (RF) (0.970, 0.964, 0.984, 0.974), Gradient Boosting (GB) (0.960, 0.959, 0.971, 0.965), XGBoost (XGB) (0.973, 0.976, 0.976, 0.976), AdaBoost (0.934, 0.934, 0.950, 0.942), Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) (0.970, 0.971, 0.976, 0.974) and Voting (0.978, 0.975, 0.987, 0.981). So, the Voting classifier gave the best results. While in the second dataset, all the algorithms gave the same results in four evaluation metrics, which indicates that each of them can effectively accomplish the prediction process. Also, this approach outperformed the previous work in detecting phishing websites with high accuracy, a lower false negative rate, a shorter prediction time, and a lower false positive rate.