Countering Phishing from Brands' Vantage Point

Most anti-phishing solutions that exist today require scanning a large portion of the web, which is vast and equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack. In addition, such solutions are not very efficient. We propose a different approach. Our solution does not rely on the scanning of the entire Internet or a large portion of it and only needs access to the brand's traffic in order to be able to detect phishing attempts against that brand. By analyzing a sample of phishing websites, we find features that can be used to distinguish phishing websites from the legitimate ones. We then use these features to train a machine learning classifier capable of helping brands detect phishing attempts against them. Our approach can detect up to 86% of phishing attacks against the brands and is best used as a complementary tool to the existing anti-phishing solutions.