Classifying Phishing Emails Using Confidence-Weighted Linear Classifiers

Though Internet users are generally becoming more aware of phishing emails and phishing websites, cyber scammers are able to come up with novel schemes constantly that circumvent phishing filters and often succeed in fooling even savvy users. Using heuristic approaches and knowledge about the phishing techniques, researchers have developed several phishing specific unique features to detect phishing emails. In this paper, we propose a new and simple methodology to detect phishing emails utilizing Confidence- Weighted Linear Classifiers. We use the contents of the emails as features without applying any heuristic based phishing specific features and obtain highly accurate results compared to the best that have been published in the literature.