Identification and Detection of Phishing Emails Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

Phishing refers to fraudulent social engineering techniques used to elicit sensitive information from unsuspecting victims. In this paper, our scheme is aimed at detecting phishing mails which do not contain any links but bank on the victim's curiosity by luring them into replying with sensitive information. We exploit the common features among all such phishing emails such as non-mentioning of the victim's name in the email, a mention of monetary incentive and a sentence inducing the recipient to reply. This textual analysis can be further combined with header analysis of the email so that a final combined evaluation on the basis of both these scores can be done. We have shown that this method is far better than the existing Phishing Email Detection techniques as this covers emails without links while the pre-existing methods were based on the presumption of link(s).