A novel neuro-fuzzy approach for phishing identification

Together with the growth of Internet, e-commerce transactions play an important role in the modern society. As a result, phishing is a deliberate act by an individual or a group of people to steal personal information such as password, banking account, credit card information, etc. Most of these phishing web pages look similar to the real web pages in terms of website interface and uniform resource locator (URL) address. Many techniques have been proposed to identify phishing websites, such as Blacklist-based technique, Heuristic-based technique, etc. However, the number of victims has been increasing due to inefficient protection technique. Neural networks and fuzzy systems can be combined to join its advantages and to cure its individual illness. This paper proposed a new neuro-fuzzy model without using rule sets for phishing identification. Specifically, the proposed technique calculates the value of heuristics from membership functions. Then, the weights are trained by neural network. The proposed technique is evaluated with the datasets of 11,660 phishing sites and 10,000 legitimate sites. The results show that the proposed technique can identify over 99% phishing sites.