Generating Optimal Attack Paths in Generative Adversarial Phishing

Phishing attacks have witnessed a rapid increase thanks to the matured social engineering techniques, COVID-19 pandemic, and recently adversarial deep learning techniques. Even though adversarial phishing attacks are recent, attackers are crafting such attacks by considering context, testing different attack paths, then selecting paths that can evade machine learning phishing detectors. This research proposes an approach that generates adversarial phishing attacks by finding optimal subsets of features that lead to higher evasion rate. We used feature engineering techniques such as Recursive Feature Elimination, Lasso, and Cancel Out to generate then test attack vectors that have higher potential to evade phishing detectors. We tested the evasion performance of each technique then classified different evasion tests as passed or failed depending on their evasion rate. Our findings showed that our threat model has better evasion capability compared to the original Generative Adversarial Deep Neural Network (GAN) which perturbs features in a random manner.