Linkcalculator – An Efficient Link-Based Phishing Detection Tool

The problem of phishing attacks continues to demand new solutions as existing solutions are limited by various challenges such as high computational requirements, zero-day attacks, needs for updates, complex ruled-based, etc. Besides, the emerging mobile market demands simple solutions to phishing due to several factors such as memory, fragmentation, etc. In response to the above challenges, a simple anti-phishing tool called LinkCalculator is presented. The proposed LinkCalculator anti-phishing scheme is based on an algorithm designed to extract link characteristics from loading URLs to determine their legitimacy. Unlike the other link-based extraction approaches, the proposed approach introduced the concept of weight to represent the different links found in a URL. This is because certain link information within parsed webpages or requests is sufficient to classify them as phishing without loss of generality. The approach is experimented using a dataset of 300 instances consisting of 150 legitimate URLs and 150 phishing URLs from openly-available research datasets. The experimental results indicate a significance performance of 100%. True Negative Rate and 0.00% False Positive Rate for legitimate instances and True Positive Rate of 96.67% with 0.03 % False Negative Rate for phishing instances which indicate that the approach offers a more efficient lightweight approach to phishing detection.