Detection of Phishing websites using Generative Adversarial Network

Phishing is typically deployed as an attack vector in the initial stages of a hacking endeavour. Due to it low-risk rightreward nature it has seen a widespread adoption, and detecting it has become a challenge in recent times. This paper proposes a novel means of detecting phishing websites using a Generative Adversarial Network. Taking into account the internal structure and external metadata of a website, the proposed approach uses a generator network which generates both legitimate as well as synthetic phishing features to train a discriminator network. The latter then determines if the features are either normal or phishing websites, before improving its detection accuracy based on the classification error. The proposed approach is evaluated using two different phishing datasets and is found to achieve a detection accuracy of up to 94%.