license: apache-2.0
I'll release the urls and features datasets soon
In the features train set, there're 593,430 websites online at the time of data collection. The plots below show the regression line and correlation coefficients of 20+ features extracted and whether the URL is malicious. If we could plot the lifespan of URLs, we could see that the oldest website has been online since Nov 7th, 2008, while the most recent phishing websites appeared as late as July 10th, 2023.
As we can see, there's no correlation between is_malicious and the columns meta_percentage, mouseover_changes, not_indexed_by_google, right_click_disabled, and popup_window_has_text_field as of July, 2023, contrary to some analyses of researchers in 2013 on phishing detection.
The majority of features have very weak correlations with is_malicious, while a minority has a weak correlation. Is this problematic for training? Not really.
I split the classification task into two stages in anticipation of the limited availability of online phishing websites due to their short lifespan, as well as the possibility that research done on phishing is not up-to-date:
- a small multilingual BERT model to output the confidence level of a URL being malicious to model #2, by finetuning on 2,154,175 legitimate and malicious URLs
- (probably) LightGBM to analyze the confidence level, along with roughly 19 extracted features
This way, I can make the most out of the limited phishing websites avaliable.
