Efficient Approach for Mitigating Mobile Phishing Attacks

Abstract

We propose a method for efficiently detecting phishing attacks in mobile environments. When a user visits a website of a certain URL, the proposed method first compares the URL to a generated whitelist. If the URL is not in the whitelist, it detects if the site is a phishing site based on the results of Google search with a carefully refined URL. In addition, the phishing detection is performed only when the user provides input to the website, thereby reducing the frequency of invoking phishing detection to decrease the amount of power used. We implemented the proposed method and used 8315 phishing sites and the same number of legitimate websites for evaluating the performance of the proposed method. We achieved a phishing detection rate of 99.22% with 81.22% reduction in energy consumption as compared to existing approaches that also use search engine for phishing detection. Moreover, because the proposed method does not employ any other algorithm, software, or comparison group, the proposed method can be easily deployed.