Visual-Similarity-Based Phishing Detection

Phishing is a form of online fraud that aims to steal a user's sensitive information, such as online banking passwords or credit card numbers. The victim is tricked into entering such information on a web page that is crafted by the attacker so that it mimics a legitimate page. Recent statistics about the increasing number of phishing attacks suggest that this security problem still deserves significant attention. This paper presents a novel technique to visually compare a suspected phishing page with the legitimate one. The goal is to determine whether the two pages are suspiciously similar. It identified and considers three page features that play a key role in making a phishing page look similar to a legitimate one.