PHISHING URL DETECTION USING MACHINE LEARNING BASED ON LEXICAL FEATURES

Abstract

Topicality. Phishing attacks remain one of the most common initial access vectors because they combine URL obfuscation, social engineering and rapid changes in domain infrastructure. From the perspective of computer science, the problem can be formulated as the classification of weakly structured textual objects; from the perspective of cybersecurity, it is a risk-reduction task aimed at preventing credential compromise, financial data leakage and malware delivery. The subject of the study is the automated detection of phishing URLs using lexical and structural features without opening or rendering the target webpage. The purpose of the article is to design and experimentally evaluate a lightweight URL pre-filtering model that can be integrated into an email gateway, browser extension or SOC monitoring module. The following results were obtained. The paper reviews current approaches to phishing mitigation and critically analyzes regulatory, organizational and machine-learning solutions. It is shown that many existing works do not sufficiently balance detection speed, interpretability and resistance to rapidly changing domains. The practical part includes the implementation of a feature extraction module and a simulation dataset of 1600 URLs. Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest and Gradient Boosting were tested. The best F1 result was obtained by Random Forest: accuracy - 0.900, precision - 0.910, recall - 0.888, F1 - 0.899. Conclusion. Lexical URL features make it possible to build a fast and interpretable phishing pre-detection mechanism; however, such a model should be used as part of a layered cyber defense system rather than as a single decision-making control.