Heuristic based malicious URL detection

Phishing is one of the most potentially disruptive actions that can be performed on the Internet. Intellectual property and other pertinent business information could potentially be at risk if a user falls for a phishing attack . The adversary sends an email with a link to a fraudulent site to lure consumers into divulging their confidential information. One of the main goal of this research is to detect phishing attempts via email. The algorithm in the previous work analyses the body text in an email to detect whether the email message asks the user to do some action such as clicking on the link that directs the user to a fraudulent website. This work expanded the text analysis portion of that algorithm, which performed poorly in catching phishing emails. The original algorithm has considerably have a lower result in filtering out malicious email as compared to modified algorithm.To address the False Positive problem, a statistical approach was adopted and the method ameliorated the False Positive Rate while minimizing the decrease in the phishing detection accuracy.