Analysis of the Performance Impact of Fine-Tuned Machine Learning Model for Phishing URL Detection

Abstract

Phishing leverages people’s tendency to share personal information online. Phishing attacks often begin with an email and can be used for a variety of purposes. The cybercriminal will employ social engineering techniques to get the target to click on the link in the phishing email, which will take them to the infected website. These attacks become more complex as hackers personalize their fraud and provide convincing messages. Phishing with a malicious URL is an advanced kind of cybercrime. It might be challenging even for cautious users to spot phishing URLs. The researchers displayed different techniques to address this challenge. Machine learning models improve detection by using URLs, web page content and external features. This article presents the findings of an experimental study that attempted to enhance the performance of machine learning models to obtain improved accuracy for the two phishing datasets that are used the most commonly. Three distinct types of tuning factors are utilized, including data balancing, hyper-parameter optimization and feature selection. The experiment utilizes the eight most prevalent machine learning methods and two distinct datasets obtained from online sources, such as the UCI repository and the Mendeley repository. The result demonstrates that data balance improves accuracy marginally, whereas hyperparameter adjustment and feature selection improve accuracy significantly. The performance of machine learning algorithms is improved by combining all fine-tuned factors, outperforming existing research works. The result shows that tuning factors enhance the efficiency of machine learning algorithms. For Dataset-1, Random Forest (RF) and Gradient Boosting (XGB) achieve accuracy rates of 97.44% and 97.47%, respectively. Gradient Boosting (GB) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) achieve accuracy values of 98.27% and 98.21%, respectively, for Dataset-2.