Improved graph-based model for phishing website detection using multi-level web page graphs and dynamic heterogeneous...

Modern phishing pages are challenging to detect because they can appear like legitimate brand sites using dynamic document object model (DOM) structures, misleading visual displays, and changing hyperlinks. Most conventional blacklists and URL-based methods do not capture the relationships at multiple levels of the web page structure. In this paper, we introduce a new graph-based phishing detection method to represent a web page with a Multi-Level Web Page Graph (MLWPG). MLWPGs incorporate DOM hierarchies, rendered visual blocks, and hyperlink relations into one heterogeneous graph. We use a novel Deep Learning Method called DHGAN that has Type-Aware Attention and Dynamic Convolution to learn how to differentiate discriminative interaction amongst structural, spatial, and navigation elements. APDA will be used in feature space to enhance robustness to evasive phishing versions. Using a balanced data set of 50,000 web pages, our complete pipeline showed a 97.0% accuracy, 96.8% F1-Score, 3.0% False Positive Rate, and 95.5% Robustness to Adversaries. The proposed MLWPG-DHGAN-APDA framework outperformed all baseline models. Our experimental results demonstrate that multi-level graph models provide improvements to both detection accuracy and reliability of operation for real-time phishing defenses.