A multi-tier phishing detection and filtering approach

Phishing attacks continue to pose serious risks for consumers and businesses as well as threatening global security and the economy. Therefore, developing countermeasures against such attacks is an important step towards defending critical infrastructures such as banking. Although different types of classification algorithms for filtering phishing have been proposed in the literature, the scale and sophistication of phishing attacks have continued to increase steadily. In this paper, we propose a new approach called multi-tier classification model for phishing email filtering. We also propose an innovative method for extracting the features of phishing email based on weighting of message content and message header and select the features according to priority ranking. We will also examine the impact of rescheduling the classifier algorithms in a multi-tier classification process to find out the optimum scheduling. A detailed empirical performance and analysis of the proposed algorithm is present. The results of the experiments show that the proposed algorithm reduces the false positive problems substantially with lower complexity.