A mobile sensing method to counteract social media website impersonation

Phishing is a serious threat to online users, especially since attackers have tremendously improved their techniques in impersonating important websites. With websites looking visually the same, users are fooled more easily. Visual similarity algorithms may help to detect and counteract some phished...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mohamed Y ELMassry, Ahmad S AlMogren
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2016-10-01
Series:International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147716671265
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Phishing is a serious threat to online users, especially since attackers have tremendously improved their techniques in impersonating important websites. With websites looking visually the same, users are fooled more easily. Visual similarity algorithms may help to detect and counteract some phished websites. Through similarity algorithms, the phishers play with the colors and visual properties of the website in a way that cannot be noticed by the users. However, the phishers make the unnoticed changes to fool the similarity algorithms as well. In this article, we propose an efficient phishing website detection algorithm using three-step checking. The performance results are compared to the state-of-the-art approaches that show new kinds of phishing warnings with better outcomes and less false positives. Our approach provides similar accuracy to the blacklisting methods with the advantage that it can easily classify the phishing websites with less overhead and without being victimized.
ISSN:1550-1477